Article Marketing is Alive and Well
Article and article submission is a great way to drive traffic to your site and at the same time, establish yourself as an expert in your field. However, like everything else in SEO, there is a right way and a wrong way to accomplish the mission in this constantly changing landscape.
Quality Articles = Good SEO
You may have recently read about the depreciation of article sites in Google’s last “Panda” Algorithm update. EzineArticles, eHow, Hubpages, ArticleBase, Yahoo contributor network and many, many more got hit hard and lost big market share in the search engine results pages. Does this mean that it’s no longer worth submitting to these sites? Absolutely not. However, the rules have changed and you must follow some guidelines to make it worth you while.
We have customers with submitted articles that are still ranking very high and continue to drive traffic to their sites.
Guidelines for Article Success
- Do not submit an articles that is already on your site or you plan on publishing on your site.
- Articles that you submit should be original and developed specifically for the Article site.
- The article content must be compelling, comprehensive and again original, not regurgitated or reworded. The key here is quality over quantity. Google will give more relevance to a comprehensive, quality article than something that is poorly written and thrown together.
- Do not be overly concerned with keyword phrase optimization. This looks unnatural and if Google sees it as unnatural, you are wasting your time. Write with the end user in mind, not SEO.
- Strike a balance so you have an equal number of quality, comprehensive articles on site and off site. It’s hard to give a great article away but it will pay you back in dividends if done correctly.
Benefits of Submitted Articles
You may be thinking, why not just publish all of our articles on site. There are several reasons why you should diversify.
- Link Building. Every offsite article you publish should have anchor text optimized back-links to your site. Follow the guidelines at the article submission site concerning this as they are all different. If back-links are not allowed, a link to your profile will be and you can publish your links there along with a short bio.
- Establish Credibility/Expert Authority. Anyone can publish on their own site but when a user see an article offsite, they tend to give it a little more credibility. There is something about reading and article on the Yahoo network that seems more authoritative. This eventually leads to the authors Website and the ultimate goal of sales/conversions.
Getting the Word Out
Weather you are publishing on site or off site, you want to let the world know that you just created a new article the they must read. A great way to get the word out is using social media channels. Send a link out to all of the social media outlets that you subscribe to. If it’s a really great news worthy article, consider taking it a step further doing a press release. We’ll take more about press releases soon. Articles may be the gas but Press Releases are the rocket Fuel of SEO.
Keith Hickman
khickman@awsp.com
Director, Web Marketing
