Not An SEO Expert

Distributing articles to other websites can be an excellent way to promote your own websites or it can be nearly a complete waste of time. The first thing you need to be sure of is that the articles are related to your website. Don’t waste your time writing poker tips articles if you sell baby blankets. You might get a lot of links back but they will be of almost no value. Secondly make sure that there are links back to your site in the article that actually work. Usually these are placed at the end of the article in an “About the Author� box. But you can also link text related to your site within the article (some free article posting websites don’t allow this).

There are basically 3 ways to distribute your articles. First you can bulk submit the article to websites that allow people to “publish� articles which in theory serve as a resource for webmasters looking for “expert� content to add to their own websites. The truth is that almost all of these sites are nothing more than free for all pages that the website owner puts pay per click ads on. Some of these sites are more than 10,000 pages. If you publish an article on one of these sites there is little to no chance a legit webmaster will find your article and place it on his/her site. So you are basically just getting the link back from the site you submitted the article to in the first place and that’s only if the search engine actually finds your article and even then it will have almost no value. The only advantage to this type of article posting is that there are hundreds of these article content sites and you can either buy software that automatically submits your articles or hire someone to do it for you. I recently tried this with a guy that submitted two articles to 180 sites for me for $30. It’s been 10 days and I’m showing 68 links to my site total from the articles. Some of the article sites are slower to post so I expect at least another 30-40 to be added over time. So are 100 very poor quality one-way links to your site worth $30? Perhaps, it all depends on where you are in the growth of your site and in what market your sites focuses. If you decide to use this method more than once to promote a site, make sure that you switch up the target of the links to internal pages on your site when submitted a second time. It will give more value than multiple home page links coming from the same site.

The second method of promoting your site by distributing articles is to submit an article to a more respected source like Ezine Articles. Many webmasters use these more respect article publishing sites as a resource for related content. The trick here is to make sure you submit a quality article. For the first method a 400 word keyword rich article is fine, but with Ezine Articles you’ll want to submit something over 600 words that provides a real opinion on your topic. I’ve had articles picked up from Ezine that ended up on PR4 pages of respected related websites. That’s not a bad deal at all.

The third and by far best method is to get a unique article posted on one related website. This can be tricky. You might have to trade the other site by posting an article of theirs on your site, pay the other site or if all else fails just beg. This article should not appear anywhere else on the web, not even your own site. Also, this article should be of the highest quality you can deliver. You will actually get visitors to your site from these articles if they are good and those visitors will already consider your site an authority. My conversion rate on visitors coming from a link in this type of article is four times my normal conversion rate. That’s powerful indeed.

So where does that leave us? Which method should you use? My answer to that question is: All of the above. Different search engines like different kinds of links. The large number low quality links might help with one search engine and the low number high quality links might help with another. I’m all about a broad based approach. As always, it’s your job to monitor the return you get based on the money you spend and time it takes you. That’s how to determine which method is best suited to your needs.

Filed by Bryan at 10:40 am under SEO
169 Comments

Sometimes when something sounds too good to be true, it is true. I’ve been doing some testing with services that claim to submit your website to hundreds of directories that are free and don’t require a link back. The claim is that for one small payment, anywhere from $10 to $50, they will submit your site to between 100 to 300(or more) directories. Obviously it sounds like a good deal, perhaps too good. But so far I’m impressed with the results I’m seeing.

I hired four different services for a minimum of 100 submissions and maximum of 300 submission 10 days ago. So far all four have produced similar results.

-10-12% sent a notice of the request being rejected for various reasons.
-33-37% have not listed my test site yet (some have long wait times).
-51-57% have posted a link to my test site.

Of the sites that accepted my link easily 65% are basically worthless links as the directory has no PR and often the pages aren’t even indexed or the directory has literally thousands of links and my link ended up buried. So that leaves less than 20% of the original directories giving me a decent link.

That might not sound too successful, but consider a few things:

Price: It’s just plain cheap. One service directory submission service submitted to 300 directories for $30. Even at 15% return that’s around 66 cents a link. And some of the links are on PR2 or even PR3 pages with as few as 5 other outbound links.

Time: It took me maybe 10 minutes to sign up, input my test site’s data and pay.

Future development: It’s only been 10 days. Some of the sites that have not accepted me yet will end up posting my link. Also, some of the directories that are not indexed yet will continue to grow. In a year I could see half of these directories listing my link on indexed pages. So for the 300 for $30 deal that’s 20 cents a link for links on themed indexed pages.

The down side is that I expect very few visitors from these links, you can’t always get a properly themed category, and most of the sites will be dealing almost zero trust rank. But overall when it comes to directory submission to free directories, it’s a deal I’ll take with a smile.

Filed by Bryan at 5:22 am under SEO
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I know. You’ve made sure you have no broken links and spell checked your entire site. You have a master plan of onsite cross linking to force PR to the landing pages you covet most. You’ve done your keyword research and perfectly selected your title tags, category names and bolded not too many keyword, but just enough. You are done with onsite SEO right? Maybe, but too many times people trying to make their websites work for them think they finish onsite SEO except for adding the occasional keyword rich articles.

First of all, check and recheck the basics. For example, right now someone in your market is experimenting with new title tags, maybe it working. It’s a great feeling when you notice your competition jump in the SERPs and you already know why they did it. Your competition is your best resource of onsite SEO information. Let them A/B test for a month and then make a change, only to see you match it in days.

Secondly, make sure you have a landing page for every related keyword phrase. I know this is somewhat basic, but new search phrases are popping up all the time in most markets. Sure blue widgets might get searched 10k times a day and faded blue widgets only 500 times a day but that’s 500 potential customers. Write an article or a review or whatever, but make sure there’s a landing page for every phrase that a potential customer might type in the search bar.

Thirdly, think and rethink your internal linking. You have total control of your onsite links. This is your most powerful tool. Not only can you move page rank but you can define product pages in any manner you wish. Each page of your website has a job to do, make sure each is doing its job with maximum efficiency.

Well that’s three example of onsite SEO that you might be ignoring, there are many more. The moral of the story is that you are never done. The idea that you build a site and then promote it is for page 3 sites. If you want to get to the top of the SERPs for any keywords that matter you’ve got to constantly look for improvements and onsite SEO is the only SEO that you have total control over.

Filed by Bryan at 5:21 am under SEO
9990 Comments