Article Marketing Content, Tips and Information

Article Marketing in Wikipedia Seriously Needs an Update

As a Wikipedia Editor, I will be updating the page on article marketing, but I’d love some suggestions from others about what to include in the update. Currently, this is what it says;

Image via CrunchBase

Traditional Article Marketing

Article marketing has been used by professionals for nearly as long as mass print has been available. A business provides content to a newspaper, possibly on a timely topic such as an article on tax audits during tax season, and the newspaper may use the article and include the business’s name and contact information. Newspapers and other traditional media have limited budgets for gathering content and these articles may be used in the business section of the newspaper.

Internet Article Marketing

Internet article marketing is used to promote products and services online via article directories. Article directories with good web page ranks receive a lot of site visitors and are may be considered authority sites by search engines,leading to high traffic. These directories then go on PageRank to the author’s website and in addition send traffic from readers.

Internet marketers attempt to maximize the results of an article advertising campaign by submitting their articles to a number of article directories. However, most of the major search engines filter duplicate content to stop the identical content material from being returned multiple times in searches. Some marketers attempt to circumvent this filter by creating a number of variations of an article, known as article spinning. By doing this, one article can theoretically acquire site visitors from a number of article directories.

Most forms of search engine optimization and internet marketing require a domain, internet hosting plan, and promoting budget. However, article advertising makes use of article directories as a free host and receives traffic by way of organic searches due to the listing’s search engine authority.

The primary goal behind article marketing is to get search engine traffic and authors generally incorporate relevant keywords or keyphrases in their articles.

This is seriously short for an article about article marketing. There are so many methods of article distribution other than mass submitting articles to article directories. Hub Pages, Squidoo Lenses, Forums, Social Media, etc.

What I would like is suggestions from others in the article marketing business as to how to update this article. I will give credit to the source of the information. So, please take the time to add anything you think needs to be added to this page at Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_marketing

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Why Google Killed The Knol Page

Image via CrunchBase

The official announcement from Google about discontinuing Google Knol Pages says this;

An important update about knol

Knol will be moving to Annotum on May 1, 2012

Knol will be discontinued as a service, but we’ve worked with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source platform based upon WordPress that allows you to continue authoring and publishing scholarly articles. You can migrate your knols to WordPress and continue your work with Annotum.

After May 1, you will no longer be able to create, view, enter or edit knols, but you will be able to export your knols to WordPress.com and download them to file through October 1st, 2012.

Google has also chosen to make the Knol pages that are already there inaccessible, so the current content on the Knol pages will be removed. They could have chosen to leave current Knols up and just disallow the creation of new Knol Pages.  The following is from the Google Webmaster Blog about how to remove content.

Image by seo_gun via Flickr

When you remove a page from your site, think about whether that content is moving somewhere else, or whether you no longer plan to have that type of content on your site. If you’re moving that content to a new URL, you should 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL—that way when users come to the old URL looking for that content, they’ll be automatically redirected to something relevant to what they were looking for.

If you’re getting rid of that content entirely and don’t have anything on your site that would fill the same user need, then the old URL should return a 404 or 410. Currently Google treats 410s (Gone) the same as 404s (Not found), so it’s immaterial to us whether you return one or the other.

Google says up in that first paragraph, “You can migrate your knols to WordPress and continue your work with Annotum. After May 1, you will no longer be able to create, view, enter or edit knols, but you will be able to export your knols to WordPress.com and download them to file through October 1st, 2012.”

Will Google follow their own advice and 301 all of the current Knol Pages to the new location at Annotum as they advise people to do when they remove content or will Google just let those links all die out? They don’t answer that question in their announcement. They do talk about it in their FAQ though.

Can I redirect my knol’s URLs so people can find the content?

Yes. Knols exported to WordPress.com will automatically be redirected. To manually set redirects, visit knol.google.com and click on My knols. On the Knols tab, each published knol will have a link to “Set a redirect URL”. Click that link and enter your new target URL. Click Save to set the redirect.

Note that users who try to visit the knol’s original URL will see a page informing them that the page’s author would like to send them to a new page and be given the choice of whether to continue. Any co-author or co-owner of a knol has permission to set or remove a redirect URL for that knol until May 1, 2012, when they will be locked.

Why is WordPress.com the default destination for Knol content?

The team at Automattic, which runs WordPress.com, has worked hard to enable Annotum and make its review and publishing functionality available by imported knols. The peer review workflow can be enabled for any Annotum site by following a few simple steps outlined in this knowledge base article.

COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY: You may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services that are not otherwise prohibited by our Content Policy or Terms of Service

From the wordpress.com terms of service; “Be responsible in what you publish. In particular, make sure that none of the prohibited items listed below appear on your site or get linked to from your site”

Below it adds, “Unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites”

Project Objectives

1. Develop a simple, robust, easy-to-use authoring system to create and edit scholarly articles
2. Deliver an editorial review and publishing system that can be used to submit, review, and publish scholarly articles

So, neither wordpress.com nor Annotum is set up for anyone that publishes commercial content, or for anyone who wants to build links to their website for SEO purposes, whereas that was allowed in Google Knol Pages. With Knols, the links were no follow, but you still had a chance of generating interest and getting people to click through and the Knol Pages were ranking well when written with SEO in mind.

My advice is, if you have any Google Knol Pages that are commercial in nature, then move them someplace other than wordpress.com or Annotum. You could take them a post them to blogger.com in a blog or multiple blogs with optimized subdomains. The terms of service there will allow them to be published. If they are spam, then there’s nowhere you can move them nor should there be,

I think it’s irresponsible for Google to handle it in this way. Had their terms of service for Knol Pages stated that commercial content was not welcome and that they were looking for “scholarly articles”, then the export to Annotum and wordpress.com would have made sense.

So basically, Google has done it again, created something, then changed their mind about it and discontinued it. Orkut, Buzz, Google Sites, and now Knol Pages. They certainly don’t mind wasting our time and effort we give using the products they create. They reward us with “Oops! We changed our mind.”

This seals the deal with Google+ fopr me as well. For me, Google is a search engine, nothing more. Any new products they create will be ignored. I just don’t have the time to waste on Google creations that will just eventually be discontinued.

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• The Spring Cleaning Continues: Google Shuts Down Knol, Lets Its Users Migrate to WordPress (siliconfilter.com)
• Google Retires Knol, Wave, Friend Connect, Gears (ghacks.net)
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Personal One on One SEO Training

Just a quick note to let people know I am available for one one one personal  SEO training. Topics can include how to build a good keyword list, How to create optimized content for web pages and blogs, how to use WordPress, how to use content to build links to your website, or anything else you have questions about.

I’ve been doing keyword research and building sites since 1995, when Yahoo was powered by Google and it was Yahoo that you needed to rank well in to get traffic. Now that Google has the most traffic, it is the primary place you want to rank well, but not ignoring traffic from Bing, Yahoo, Social Media and other sources.

The charge for this one on one training is $75 per hour. To put that in perspective, I can train someone to use WordPress at an almost expert level in around 30 minutes. I don’t use a lot of technical terms to confuse you. I have an easy way to teach you so that you actually understand not only how to do something, but exactly why you are doing it.

My phone number is 512-322-9566. Ask for Chris McElroy. I’ll be happy to help and I’ll include a free website analysis on top of the training or do the training based on what needs to be done at your site.

Response to Allen Taylor’s Response to Michael Martinez Post on SEO Theory :)

Allen Taylor posted a response to Michael Martinez’ post on SEO Theory and I decided to expand on that response here.

Image via Wikipedia

Content VS Link Building

Content is king. Links only support content, they are not more important than content, never were, never will be. Left you see Google’s home page from 1998. Content was king then and still is today.

Title Tags

Title tag for a web page should be the key phrase you are targeting for ranking that page IF the title also makes someone want to click it.

Description Tag

You should write your own description tag. If you have a header tag on the page that is or contains a key phrase you are targeting and you want google to use the description in the paragraph on the page below that header, then don’t use that key phrase in your description.

If you write your own description tag and you rank for a particular phrase that IS in the description, google will use your description. If google does NOT find that phrase in the description, it will use what’s on the page. So you can use google snippets to pull content for some phrases while keeping your own description for other phrases.

Keywords

Not doing keyword research and not using keywords in your pages is moronic. No other way to put it. That does NOT mean using the key phrase you want to rank for over and over again. It’s all about semantics.

Your key phrase in the title tag and in the header tags on the page basically tells the googlebot what you’d LIKE to rank for. The bot will then search the content for other keywords it expects to find on a page that is really about that topic. If it finds those related words, you have a chance to rank well. Pretty simple.

Link Building

As far as building links goes, building a lot of links from anywhere you can get them, using the same anchor text for most if not all of them, and pointing them all to your home page is a total waste of time.

Google isn’t stupid. They aren’t going to believe that suddenly 1000 people linked to you and all of them underlined and linked the exact same words to describe your site and all of them linked to the exact same page.

You don’t need a ton of links. You need links from high-traffic websites that are related to your topic. You promote content, you don’t just build links.

Building knol pages, hub pages, squidoo lenses, posting an article in a related forum if they allow it, these are things that are good for building high-quality links. But it has to be 100% original content and it has to be interesting and it has to be helpful to people.

Those are the reasons you get click-thrus from those articles. It isn’t about the links. it’s about getting people to read the content and want to come to your website. The fact that you are also link building and feeding the algorithm is a side benefit, not the purpose of real article marketing.

Keyword Domains

Image via CrunchBase

Yes, the keywords in the domain name do help you rank well in search engines. Sorry, but it’s a fact, not a theory.

Just search for SEO on Google. SEO.com is #1. According to Michael’s theory, this makes the people at SEO.com better at SEO than anyone else on the web . . . or another theory is . . . they own SEO.com. I’ll say the latter is correct, not to say anything bad about the people at SEO.com, but the best in the world at SEO? Seriously? They were smart enough to get SEO.com though. Gotta give em that.

With searches for most keywords, you will find that keyword in the URL, not necessarily the domain name itself, like wikipedia.com/keyword. Having the keywords in your domain name is not enough. Other factors are at play here like the actual content on the page.

You can overcome not having the keywords in your domain name, but the key word in this sentence is “overcome”. Why handicap yourself and “overcome” not having the keyword in your domain name? It is an advantage and every little thing you can do to gain an advantage is a good thing. It’s why we still use alt tags, header tags and other things. Any one of those by themselves is not that important. But if you do them all, it adds up.

If you own a company, you should own the domain that matches your company name. You use that on biz cards, letterhead, ads, etc. You brand that name. But your website can be physically located on a domain name that matches the product you sell or the service you provide or the key phrase that brings you the most traffic.

Your “company domain name” is simply pointed to or redirected to that keyword domain so the people who see your ads, biz cards, letterhead and such will still arrive at the right place. In the search engine results pages, people click links and don’t care what the domain name is. It can even help you track what is happening because of your seo efforts vs what is happening because of your marketing efforts.

Anyway, there is so much misinformation out there, I thought I’d straighten some of it out. Need 100% original Content written for you? Let us optimize your web pages the right way. Call us at 512.322.9566 for a free SEO consultation.

Article Submissions To Article Directories Is Not The Way To Go

Seriously, are you still getting a bunch of cheap articles written and distributing them to thousands of article directories? That method used to work. It was never that effective, but now it’s simply obsolete as a link-building method. The last Google update, Panda should have convinced you of that, but that method was dead before the update.

You don’t even have a way of knowing how many people actually read those articles let alone if they actually got published at the places you submitted them to. Plus, if it is garbage content, then no one who does read it will ever visit your website. Using article marketing just for link popularity is the wrong way to go.

1. Well-written articles will help you establish yourself as an expert in your field.

2. Well-written articles that are interesting to the reader will get them to click through to your website where you can actually make a sale.

Those are reasons to do article marketing. Links back to your website are the side-benefit of article marketing, not the purpose!

You need to promote good, original content, not spinning articles or hiring people to write them for the lowest price possible. It seems that poeople get the idea that something works and they will stay with that method even if it kills them. People hate change.

If you are still going with the cheap articles, thousands of directory submissions method, then you are missing the boat. Good article marketing is not cheap anymore. get over it. Hire some good content writers. Have them get those new articles onto knol pages, hub pages, squidoo lenses, large forums that allow articles to be published and other high-traffic websites.

These high-traffic websites that allow you to place good, original content on them is the method you should be using. You will know exactly where your article is published and know exactly how many people read it. Here are some details for you to look at;

Image via CrunchBase

1. Google Knol Pages – http://knol.google.com If you go there and do a search for your keywords, you will see several knol pages about that topic. You see next to each one how many people read those articles. Nice to know how many people actually read your articles. We can add images, embed video, use bold text, headers and other formatting to dress up the article and make it more appealing, more like a web page than an article. If you build the first one that is just all about your company, then build more knol pages, you add links to those knol pages from your first google knol page about your company. So you end up with a Central Knol about your conmpany that links to all of your other knol pages. That is exactly like having another website.

Image via CrunchBase

2. Hub Pages – (This is going to sound almost identical to a knol page) http://www.hubpages.com is another place you can search for one of your keywords to see what other people have done with their articles. Again, you get to know how many people read the article and get other useful analytics as well. We can add images, embed video, use bold text, headers and other formatting to dress up the article and make it more appealing, more like a web page than an article. If you build the first one that is just all about your company, then build more hub pages, you add links to those hub pages from your first hub page about your company. So you end up with a Central Hub about your conmpany that links to all of your other hub pages. That is exactly like having another website.

Image via CrunchBase

3. Squidoo Lens – http://www.squidoo.com You can also search there for lenses about your topic to see what others have done. You’ll notice that these are much longer than knols or hubs. Knols and hubs are one article. A lens is 10 articles. As with the hubs and knols we can add images, embed video, use bold text, headers and other formatting to dress up the articles and make them more appealing. The difference here is that you have us write a series of articles that flow from article to article like chapters in a book. Again you get to see how many people read the lens and everything.

Using Google Analytics in your website means you will also know how many of those readers actually visited your website. It’s crucial to know what kind of return you get from the different methods you use to drive more traffic to your website. The same things do not work for everyone. Having the knowledge of what is and is not working allows you to make adjustments and improve the return on your investment in SEO and Marketing.

Now that is article marketing. You may need to review your own article marketing plan if you are not including these methods. We can help.

Pricing

Google Knol Pages run $80 including the content writing and everything.

Hub Pages run $60 including the article writing.

A Squidoo Lens runs $400, including the 10 articles.

I’ve been doing article marketing longer than almost anyone on the web. I own 2 article directories myself, one of them with more than 150,000 articles in it and I’m still advising my clients not to go that route. The options above are so much better and the sites are much higher quality and they have more traffic than the article directories. For instance; My article directory gets 35,000 unique visitors per month. Hubpages.com gets 1 million+. Combine that higher traffic with the tracking that analytics gives you and you have a real article marketing plan.

Contact us here or call 512.322.9566 for a free, no-obligation consultation.

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