Not An SEO Expert

February 22, 2006

Using Articles to Boost Link Popularity and Get Visitors

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