SEO Tips and Resources

A frequently employed method for article marketing is to submit content directly to article directories.  A top tier directory will make these posted articles available to webmasters for publication, if those webmasters a) happen to use that directory, b) search for one of your keywords and c) don’t find your article to pose a competitive threat.  Nearly all of the best ranked directories will allow you to include one or more links back to your website, but those links are typically restricted to the author’s resource box, most often at the end of the article.  That is a time honored and reasonably effective way to promote your site.  You should also be aware, though, of another way to get your articles out to non-directory websites.

If, in addition to using article directories, you offer your valuable content directly to other websites who happen to be in your niche or a closely related niche, you will find certain additional benefits beyond those that come from only submitting to article directories.  One additional benefit is that you will be able to exercise some control over who publishes your article.  You can select websites that recieve targeted traffic from which you might profit.  You can make sure that you have longer lasting search engine optimization (SEO) benefits by providing each website with unique content.  You can determine that each site’s content is unique by writing a different article for each site or (more efficiently) fully spinning the articles in order to obtain far better results from just a little more time and effort.  Still another advantage is that you can place the links to your website within the context of the article.  That placement has definite SEO advantages.

In the usual method of direct distribution to websites, you would attempt to contact the individual webmasters by email, or, if you can locate a number, by phone in order to convince whomever reaches the publishing decisions at that website can be convinced of the mutual benefit of uploading your article.  If your article is high quality, and if it is not too competitive with the site that you are approaching, you should find that this approach is sometimes successful.  However, far too often, you will get no response at all from the webmasters that you attempt to contact.  When they do reply, more often than you wish, they will decline your offer.

Another option for article syndication directly with websites is through an automated distribution system that distributes spun versions of your articles directly to niche specific sites who have expressed a positive interest in receiving free content.  That is the way that a new system operates; that system is named My Article Network, which I have described in detail elsewhere.

Webmaster can register their sites for free in this consortium.  That means that you should always have a niche-related publisher awaiting your next submission.  (Note: There are no pornographic sites or sites that encourage illegal activity.)

Whether you use the labor intensive method of contacting individual websites or the newer, easier method, I strongly urge all content marketers to broaden distribution beyond the usual top ranked directories.  I know from my own experiences that the benefits far outweigh the costs of the additional required effort.

Technorati Tags: article distribution, article marketing, article spin, article spinning, article syndication, content distribution, content marketing, content syndication, myarticlenetwork

Internet Marketing Resources article distribution, article marketing, article spin, article spinning, article syndication, content distribution, content marketing, content syndication, myarticlenetwork

Considering how much time and money an online marketer spends on article marketing, we all hope for good value for our expenditures.  Whether we write the articles ourselves, use the writing talents of our employees or contract with an expert professional writer, online marketers want to recoup those expenditures as quickly as possible via increased traffic and revenue.

Article directories are the most frequently used distribution point for our content.  A good article directory offers us three major advantages.  First, a top tier article directory attract a lot of traffic.  That results in a lot of potential readers being able to access our articles on the directory, itself.  An attractive title will encourage a lot of those visitors to read our articles and, perhaps, click through to our website.

Second, webmasters of other sites within our niche will pick up our article with our embedded links for publication on their own sites.  While these niche specific sites will have less traffic than the directory, that traffic will be more targeted, so our article will be relevant to those visitors’ interests.  Consequently, we can expect a higher proportion of those niche website’s visitors to choose to read our article.

The third advantage is that the search engines are very likely to notice the links to our site from the syndicated article, and, as a result, our search engine listings are probably going to improves.  Unfortunately some of the benefit of our search results will be limited and temporary, because repeated publication of the same article on a number of sites will be considered duplicate content.  Once the search engine robots have done their job properly, most of those duplicate external links will have disappeared in terms of their SEO value.

If we handle of syndication to article directories properly, we will provide unique articles to each directory to which we submit.  If we spin our content, then we can accomplish producing multiple unique versions of the same content.  However, even when we go to the trouble of spinning so that each article directory gets a unique version, those niche sites that get our articles from the same directory will be duplicate content.  So this approach to spinning is a huge improvement over distributing the same article to multiple directories, it leaves room for improvement in maximizing our benefit from our article marketing efforts.

An alternative to using only article directories is to also distributed unique articles to individual sites within our marketing niche.  Unfortunately this can be a time consuming challenge in identifying potential publishers for our articles and then convincing those webmasters that they can actually benefit from publication of our articles (and our contextual links).

Fortunately there is a semi-automated system to make implementation of this peer-to-peer exchange easier.  I think of it as a content distribution coop.  I provide a detailed description of this automated article marketing system elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: article directory, article marketing, article spinning, article syndication, content syndication

Internet Marketing Resources article directory, article marketing, article spinning, article syndication, content syndication