Article Marketing for SEO

One of the major problems for new sites, and even well established sites, is building and maintaining relevant links. You have gone through the directories sites and found that they are mostly of very poor PageRank and filled with hundreds of other poor quality websites that you wouldn’t want your site to be associated with. So how can you obtain relevant links?

Article Marketing

Article marketing is the process of writing content for distribution around the web. You might think, that is ridiculous. Why would I want to waste my time writing content so that other people can use it on their website when I am having a hard enough time trying to write good quality content for my own website? Well, there is method in this madness. Article distribution can confer benefit on your site in a number of ways:

• Article Quality – written articles are usually reviewed by a human, which screens out many poor quality or spammy articles and ensures that only good quality, unique content is syndicated. The sites which use the content are then also attributed with a  certain amount of trust  and therefore so are the links back.
• Traffic – the distribution of articles can generate useful, converting traffic when people read your article and follow the link to your web site. There is not a lot of traffic and it is usually short-lived but the people that follow the links are  more likely to be interested in what you have to sell or say.
• Anchor text – the anchor text in the link to your site does not have to be the name of your web site. It can be the keyword that you are targeting. This provides an excellent leverage on particular keywords which are trying to achieve results for.

Article Writing

Having convinced you of the benefits of article marketing. How does it work? After you have written your article it is submitted to a article website such as ArticleMarketer.com where it will be reviewed. If there are any problems it will be returned, until you have corrected all the problems.

Articles should be around 400-600 words long. The content should not be a thinly disguised sales pitch  but should contain some useful information for the reader. However, as far as the author is concerned, the important section for the publisher is the section the ‘About the Author’ paragraph.

It is here you can write a bit about yourself, detailing your expertise and you place a link which contains your keyword as the anchor text linking back to your website. There is also a non-html section for information, in which you would write something similar but just add the name of the website instead of a link. To ensure that your hard work does not get published on irrelevant sites, you also select the relevant subject areas which you think are your target audience.

When the article is accepted, it is distributed to its content network and placed on relevant websites as content. A good article can be distributed to around a thousand websites. A report of the sites that published your article can also be generated.

Article marketer is a paid service, but it is not too expensive for the potential benefits. They also provide a free service which distributes articles to a small fraction the sites in its paid service. You can’t get a report and it takes a lot longer for your article to be reviewed but it is still useful.

Other article distribution sites include articlexplosion.com and ezine articles.  I have not had much take up of articles using Ezine however but again it is free so there might be some benefit for you.

Duplicate Content

On of the major concerns about articles is to do with duplicate content. If your article is published on many sites then it will surely be duplicate content? This is true but you wouldn’t post the article on your own web site. Your article is for syndication and the benefit is the links  and traffic that accrue. The articles you write must be for external publishing only. Articles are also a short-term boost to the rankings.

When an article is distributed, the links generated on these will produce a brief increase in traffic and links that make the site increase in the SERPs. With a steady flow of articles, as the effect of one article is declining, a new article takes its place and keeps the site’s positions. If this can be maintained over a period of months, the fact that the site is has a good position in the SERPs will help it develop its own backlinks and it becomes easier to keep its positions.

I have successfully used articles to bring websites to the first page and keep them there so it is a tried and tested method which is a very useful tool to be used alongside the traditional methods of developing links.