SEOenthusiast

Articles
As recently as late 2005 (pre Jagger update) article marketing was rather innovative and unknown. It's maturity since savvy webmasters have realised that reciprocal links are next to worthless has also adversely affected it's effectiveness. The message: Persevere! Quality reigns in article writing. Well written articles with interesting and useful content will rise to the top and be used by other webmasters as content with the resulting link back to your site.
First rule: Don't trust the article sites. It's worth noting at this point that the real winners in the article writing tsunami trend are the article repository owners themselves who all make their living through adwords. The model is perfect and lucrative for them - thousands, if not millions of webmasters eagerly writing articles with keyword rich content, wonderful fodder for the search engines to come across, index and feed to searchers alongside adwords. Imagine if you could get that kind of content, free, for your site, provided through submission. Thus companies such as EzineArticles and GoArticles have a good business through the trend. Remember this when interacting with the article sites.
The strange fact is that the model works for webmasters too! We're not the primary winners, but we are next in line. If you can write articles that are insightful and thought provoking, occasionally humorous, helpful - other webmasters do actually find the article, use it on their site and the backlink shows in the search engine backlink checks. It works!
In terms of time it's an expensive way to get links. But when we consider the amount of real work that goes into getting a good link, and the effect of the article helping with marketing of the site/services/products as well as backlinks - it can be a useful leverage of time, especially since the same article may be used several times on different external web sites.
How to write articles and submit them: Write something that someone else is going to want. Make it more than 500 words to be worthwhile, and resist the inclination to pad the article with paragraphs that are not important (you'll only need one poor impression for another webmaster to conclude that the article is not concise and too wordy and to move on to another article). Some article sites allow links to your resources within the paragraphs and some don't - it's worth maintaining two versions of the same article - links within the paragraph are worth far more than links at the end of the paragraph (for this reason alone EzineArticles, although the juggernaut of the article industry, are not the best, they don't allow in-line href links). Make a small 15-30 word summary of the article, and make a resource box where your site links are included. Submit the articles to 5 - 10 article sites (easy to search for - search '{your subject} articles', 'free articles' and 'submit articles' and only choose organic placements for sites to submit to).
One factor that is still not fully known is the effect of duplicate content - your articles are on several web sites - how will the search engines respond? The solution? Leave the problem to the article sites by not including the articles on your own site. This is a common error in article marketing! Beware! Keep safe, don't include the article on your own site and don't therefore worry about how the search engines will act with duplicate content. If you really have to have the article on your site too - either change the content so that it won't be seen as duplicate - or just don't submit it to article sites. Don't risk it - search engines don't tell you why you don't appear highly and there are hundreds of possible reasons for you to be guessing on. They won't bother to work out whose site the article belongs to - they'll decide their own way and it may well not favour you. It's not worth the nagging fear.
Writing articles works for SEO, but don't forget that the model works best for the article companies first, webmasters a poor second. That said - writing insightful articles that someone else will want can result in leverage for the time spent for positive effect in search engine optimisation.
Further Reading: Article Marketing | Articles and Yahoo Search


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