SEO Blog

It’s been widely accepted that writing articles related to your industry or business is a great way of driving additional traffic to your site and building links. Whilst this may be so, many people can often overstate the power of article marketing or worse totally undermine their efforts by writing sloppy copy.

Writing articles is an affordable and effective way of driving traffic to your site, not only that but it can increase your site’s authority within search engines. This will allow your site to appear higher up in the SERPs for your desired keywords. So you can see that writing articles has a two pronged effect of driving traffic; the article itself can be used to attract custom and refer users to your site, whilst the sheer presence and referral of a link to your site will help you rise up the rankings, in theory that is.
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Unfortunately, building links for a site was never intended to be easy. Yes, you can sign up for directories, submit articles, press releases and hubs, but the glean any value from them takes time. There’s no avoiding that.

This isn’t entirely accidental. It is a product of links being ascribed a value, not only in SEO terms but financial ones too (although you could argue these two are permanently interlinked anyway). The pay off often comes by way of content, which invariably takes a fair amount of time to generate, regardless of the quality levels you employ.

If link building could be done in minutes, we’d all have sites with millions of links. This would slowly undermine the algorithms and force tighter scrutiny from search engines. Essentially, it’s probably best that those who are clever with their link building strategies are rewarded more than those who treat them as quick, disposable commodities.
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Unconventional perhaps, but the Internet has changed the primary function of a press release.  In days of yore you would simply write a press release when you had a newsworthy story and would then continue to distribute it to a select few media outlets.

This method ensured your press release would get picked up by the right people and had the chance for some local or national exposure. Unfortunately, more often than not, it would end up in an editor’s in-tray and be forgotten about. Therefore it would largely be a waste of time and effort – hence why they were few and far between.

However, the Internet has changed all of that. Now there are thousands of press releases created each day and syndicated right across the web. But not all these releases are necessarily there to get the attention of some tabloid newspaper editor; in fact, most wouldn’t even get into a free local rag.
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One of the most important aspects of SEO is developing a decent stream of incoming links. This means having to find a variety of sources prepared to host a link to you as well as relying on natural links to build as a result of your site’s content.

You can spend hours trying to find a decent directory or emailing countless people in the vain hope of securing a link. So why not speed it all up a bit? Write one decent article, submit it to a range of decent directories and have it syndicated to sites across the Internet. Bingo, you’ve got dozens of links in a very short period of time.

But if only life were so simple. The theory is great, the practice though can be a little different. So let’s have a look at a few of the pros and cons of this SEO technique that polarises many in the industry.

First up, the pros:

Links, links, links – It’s an obvious one, but every link has the ability to add good strength to your site. So by submitting your article to dozens of sites and including an embedded link in each one, invariably you will earn links as a consequence.

As already mentioned, you’ll get even more links when other people choose to republish the article on their own sites. So you can even end up in the hundreds if you are particularly successful.

It’s free – Unless you use special syndication software, it shouldn’t cost you a penny to submit an article. Even top sites like Ezine Articles won’t charge for the privilege of hosting your content.

It’s easy – Just write an article, sign in and publish – nothing too complicated about that.

Now though, the cons:

Duplicate content issues – the more astute of you will probably have noticed a reasonable flaw in all of this. If your content is exactly the same and plastered across numerous different sites, surely that will trip a duplicate content penalty from Google. Well, most probably, yes.

It isn’t always easy to measure, but if you are just going to focus solely on distributing one article to hundreds of sites, it is likely that you will only really get long-term benefits from a handful. The links aren’t worthless, but they aren’t likely to propel you to the top any time soon either.

Measuring success – The issue of how exactly to measure the success of an article has plagued the industry for some time now. A unique article title will certainly help; this way you can just put that in quotations and see what the search engines throw back. But then of course determining the strength of links and traffic can be difficult to gauge.

Spam by any other name… – These mass produced articles are everywhere, and whilst the measurability of effectiveness is still challenged, much of the regurgitated content is clogging the Internet. Some see it as entirely unproductive, unless of course you have something new and interesting to say. In the most part though, it is usually content not good enough to put on your own blog – so what does that say?

For what it’s worth, if you are struggling to get links, weak or otherwise, then article marketing is a great way to add some instantly. They won’t necessarily be the best referrals, but they will at least start building your profile.

If you’re smart about where you submit to and how you choose to promote your articles, there are benefits to be had. But when you just dump them wherever will take them without any real thought, you could just be doing extra work without any of the benefit.

So it’s not worth discounting entirely, but you should certainly be looking to attach article marketing to a more sustainable link building programme built on relevance, variety and strength.

Implementing search engine optimisation campaigns doesn’t have to be seen as a necessary chore. Whether you work as an SEO professional or are implementing changes to your own site, it is important to enjoy what you’re doing.

There are always going to be some tasks that you find are more arduous than others. Maybe you don’t like writing Meta or perhaps locating links is your idea of hell? Well, there are always benefits. The good thing about SEO is that it provides results. Whether good or bad, any work that you do will provoke a reaction.

Some people are more statistically driven than others. But it is hard not to have a small flutter of excitement as a page that you have optimised makes it onto the first page of Google. Better still is the feeling when traffic increases two-fold as a consequence.

SEO is one of the few marketing formats that provides this kind of feedback. Whilst changes can take time to take full effect, an analytics package will provide you with enough details to show you whether the hard work that you’ve put into optimisation are paying off.

But okay, analytics aren’t everything. What else can you do to bring a bit of life into your work? Well, if you’re focusing on link building and enjoy writing but hate trawling the Internet for suitable sites and directories, why not try something different?
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If you are using article marketing to promote your site, you will be all too aware of how much time it takes to write and submit your cherished content. Of course the most time consuming is the writing itself. First you have to research your subject, then you have to come up with a title then you actually have to produce the copy.

The whole process can take hours from start to finish. If time is precious and resources scarce, this might be time that you think could be better spent elsewhere. Well, there’s no need to abandon it just yet. Article marketing becomes a whole lot simpler when you work in batches.
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Time and time again you find people publishing, and republishing the same nonsense. If you write one good article, don’t ruin its strength and effectiveness by distributing to thousands of weak sites. Perceived wisdom is that you want to get as many links as possible, true. But it is the quality links that will ultimately provide most value, not the masses of worthless trackbacks.

You might be thinking that this flies in the face of convention and what I’ve said previously on the matter, but hear me out. Firstly, article distribution is a good way to build a link profile, particularly for new or older sites without any authority. The idea is that you get many links coming in and hope to goodness that a few are very strong and so will provide added value. As it is, the many low quality links will still have a slight benefit.
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There’s a common misconception that everything in SEO has to be performed within the confines of your own website. In fact, a great deal can be done in the outer peripheries of your site’s sphere to help boost your search engine optimisation efforts.

Link building is done almost exclusively away from your site. Whilst of course it is preferable to attract links organically through providing interesting content, through the pages of your site or blog posts (often referred to as link building), there’s plenty more that you can be done elsewhere.
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There aren’t many better things for a website’s SEO than a long list of top quality inbound links. If you’re struggling to rank where you’d like to be, then article writing and submission could well provide a very useful tool.

It’s one of the simplest search engine marketing techniques going and it doesn’t really require any expertise. All you need to be able to do is write an interesting article that will resonate with people and then unleash it online. Whilst writing may not come naturally to everybody, you’ll have the opportunity to write about the things that you’re most knowledgeable about – presumably at least – in so far as they should all be related to your industry.

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There’s often a strange belief that doing SEO yourself is impossible. It’s not, far from it in fact. Whilst you may not have the expert knowledge of a professional Search Engine Marketer, there’s no reason why you can’t make a start yourself.

Copy

The simplest place to start is with copy. We all know how to write, with some people clearly more confident than others. However, even if your understanding is basic, there’s still no reason why you can’t start padding a website out with some rudimentary content.

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