By
allen on November 13th, 2008
Posted in Article SEO | 1 Comment »
Article SEO is a lot like SEO for a website, but a bit less complicated. There are some things you can do to make your articles stand out more. Here some hints to help you optimize your articles better:
- Include your keyword in the first three words of your article title
- Make sure your primary keyword is in the first and last sentence of your article
- Sprinkle your keyword throughout your article on an average of one mention per paragraph
- Use lists to pare down your word count and enhance the visual look of your article
- Bold or italicize important keyword-based text sparingly and moderately
- If possible, use one or two instances of anchor text in your article
- Break your article into sections and give each section a keyword-based subhead
- Add title attributes to your anchor text tags
Make sure that you do everything you can do to improve your article’s SEO. That will increase its publishing worth as well and the more your articles are published the more likely you will build inbound links to your important content.
Talk to an article consultant about more ways to increase your article SEO.
By
Bill Platt on September 14th, 2008
Posted in Article Marketing, Article SEO, Article Submissions | 1 Comment »
As a professional article marketer and someone very interested in winning the Google ranking game, i pay real close attention to what Google likes and dislikes. I pay attention to their mouthpiece Google Guy, Matt Cutts says; I read Google’s blogs; and I read blog posts and news stories posted about Google.
As with any industry, it is important to be well read and open to all viewpoints relative to the work you are doing. When one is interested in getting good google rankings, it is generally very wise to absorb everything that can be learned about the inner-workings of Google. In gaining knowledge about your industry and your adversaries, you are better prepared to meet the challenges you will face.
Article marketing is a promotional method that when used well, is a very powerful tool in the search engine ranking challenge. There are of course right ways and wrong ways to use article marketing to build traffic to your website and to improve your website’s ranking in Google’s search results pages (SERPs).
But, when one takes the time to work article marketing in the way that is was first developed, then the sky is the limit. The way article marketing was designed was to create content that people would want to publish, and then to give people the right to publish it for free, provided a bio and link is given back to the author of the article.
From the inception of Google (the college thesis that explained how Google would produce better search results), the focus has always been on organic inbound links to a website. From the beginning, the founders of Google knew that a website should be ranked according to how many people create links to it, and the ranking should take into account the quality of the page presenting the links.
When done correctly, article marketing can generate links from websites of all sizes, from around the world. When your work impresses its readers, you can find your articles translated to Italian, Russian, German, and many other languages. How much did it cost me to get my articles translated into these other languages? Not a dime. The people who did the translation liked the content so much, that they did the translation for me for free, just so that they could share my message with their readers!
Your articles will end up on domains from around the world and .ORG, .NET, .EDU, all from websites of various topics and sizes, and from webistes in dozens of different countries including the UK and the Philippines. Some sites that will print your articles have hundreds of thousands of articles on every topic, while others have two dozen pages on just a few specific topics. You may even find your articles on College Websites that have dot com domain names.
When you write great articles, people of every class, race, location, business model, and domain type and location will publish your articles, as demonstrated by the links in the above paragraphs.
I truly believe that this is what Google wants to see, when they see us using article marketing as a link building procedure. They want to see your articles published a little bit of everywhere. When they see that, then they know that what you write has value in the eyes of many, so therefore, the links from your articles deserve to be given real merit. I wrote another article that described this in much greater detail, as seen here and on dozens of other websites.
Some people are willing to argue that article marketing is a promotional method looked down upon by Google, as described here. But frequently the people making this argument are the ones who make a half-assed attempt at article marketing, and when they have done their article marketing badly or in a lazy way, they prefer to blame the technique, rather than to look in the mirror for blame.
The people who have “bad luck” with article marketing are frequently those who either write really bad articles, with poor grammar or no real value for the reader, they use some cookie-cutter system to distribute their articles, or a combination of both.
Cookie-cutter article distribution systems are those that send all of the articles they distribution to exactly the same websites, every time they process an article. When the article is cookie-cutter distributed and the article has no real value to its readers, then every article by that author will have the exact same footprint in the linking portfolio as the next article. Google has always complained about and tried to wipe out the value of any cookie-cutter linking system.
Over the years Google has been successful at wiping out many cookie-cutter link building systems. Do you remember the FFA craze (Free-For-All pages)? It doesn’t work anymore. Do you remember those “paid link” services? Most of those offer no search ranking value anymore. Do you remember those paid blog post services? Yep. We have been advised against those too.
I believe that cookie-cutter article distribution services are coming to the same end, if they have not already lost their value in the algorithms of Google.
Does that mean that since I own an article distribution service that I am quaking in my shoes? No - I am not worried. Why? Because my article distribution service has NEVER been a cookie-cutter service. By design, we do not force feed articles to article directories. (If you want your articles placed in article directories, then we suggest you also use Isnare.com in addition to our service.)
Our article distribution processes rely entirely upon the publishers’ democracy of choice. When one puts an article into an article directory, one must hope that a web publisher happens to be browsing the article directory where your article is published. In our approach, we strive to send your articles directly to the publishers / webmasters who are most likely to want to publish your articles.
We have established long-running relationships with publishers going back to 2001, and we are recognized as a company that consistently sends its publishers the most appropriate content to meet their desires. We have been complemented frequently for only sending content to publishers that they want to reproduce.
Because we hand select which publishers / webmasters we feel would appreciate receiving and publishing your articles, no two articles will have the exact same footprint in the algorithms of Google or any other search engine.
If you want to rely upon a cookie-cutter system for the distribution of your articles, then that will be your choice to do. But, if you are looking to also use a non-cookie-cutter article distribution service, then you should seriously consider also using The Phantom Writers for your article distributions.
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My name is Bill Platt and I would be happy to serve you for your article distribution needs. I have owned and operated ThePhantomWriters.com since its inception in 2001. I also operate the Links And Traffic Pay-For-Ranking Organic Link Building Service.
By
allen on September 10th, 2008
Posted in Article Marketing, Article SEO, Article Writing, Author Resource Box | 4 Comments »
Some folks are still under the false impression that keyword density is important. It’s not and it never has been.
The Definition Of Keyword Density
Keyword density is defined as the percentage of targeted keywords to your total number of words in content. So if your targeted keyword is “bacon bits” and you write a 1,000-word article using the targeted keyword 20 times, your keyword density will be 2%. Many gurus say the optimal keyword density is somewhere between 1% and 7%, the optimal varying depending on which guru you speak to, but 1% is the low and 7% is the high end of the advice given.
There are several problems with this approach to article writing:
- No. 1, if you write naturally then any well-written article will fall within that range of keyword use
- The focus on keywords seems wise because search engines rank pages for keywords
- Note that search engines rank pages for keywords, not according to keywords - not a semantic delineation
- Search engines give weight to a number of factors on a page and off-page and the weight given to each of the factors is different and could fluctuate from one day, week, or month to the next
- No one knows the weight given to all the factors on any given day
In short, search engine ranking factors are a mystery. No one knows what they are completely. We can guess what they are based on past experience, but since the search engines are always changing their ranking algorithms we can never fully know the complete picture.
On ranking pages for keywords vs. according to them, when you type “bacon bits” into the search field at your favorite search engine and get a list of web pages for that keyword, you will likely get results that are close, somewhat close, and not even close to what you are looking for. Even a web page about interstellar space travel could show up on the results page if the keyword is used on the page. Inbound link anchor text is as important a ranking factor as actual keyword usage and all you have to do is Google “About Us” to see this in action.
Click on the search results for PCWorld’s About Us page. There are 279 words in the body content of that page. Exactly 0 of those words are the phrase “about us”, yet the result is the fourth from the top on the Google search results page. If I use the browser find function for the phrase then I’ll find only one usage of that phrase on the page and it’s on the bottom menu bar, which means it will appear on every page of the PCWorld website. This page’s keyword density is - drumroll - 0. Pretty important, huh?
So How Does Keyword Density Apply To Article Marketing?
So how does this relate to articles that likely won’t appear on your own website. First, you have to understand the goal and importance of article marketing. The goal is to promote your website, building inbound links, and drive traffic to your site. You are not building on-page SEO benefits. Furthermore, your link building benefits do not exist within the article itself, but in the author resource box at the end of the article. This is where you’ll put your inbound links.
Let’s assume you write a bang-up author resource box with one good anchor text link to the page that you want to benefit. Does that mean the rest of your article is not important? No, not all.
You want your article to be well-written and reader-friendly. That is, you want readers to be able to get some benefit out of it. Otherwise, it’s a pretty useless article. It can be SEOd to the hilt and have perfect keyword density, but if readers within your niche don’t find the article of any value then it’s a perfectly useless article. The article, above all, must have value. Even an article with sub-optimal keyword density can drive traffic to your website and build you solid inbound links if it provides real value to readers within your niche.
Any article that is deemed a quality article by e-zine publishers, bloggers, and webmasters within your niche may be used by them. Every time a publisher uses your article you’ll get a new inbound link. If your article is SEOd well then the publisher will get the benefits of on-page SEO. You, however, as the writer, will get the benefit of off-page SEO. Neither on-page nor off-page SEO is more important; they must work together to achieve the same benefit for your website. Obviously, on-page SEO must come first or any off-page SEO you strive for will be in vain. Article marketing uses the age-old principle: Help yourself by helping others first.
That said, you should write articles that provide publishers with the best on-page SEO benefits as possible. If you do that then they’ll use more of your articles. You’ll get more links to your website, their readers will get the benefit of your knowledge, and the publishers will get the benefit of highly optimized web content. But what does that mean?
What Highly Optimized Article Content Means
Remember those ranking factors? You aren’t trying to build inbound links to your articles so forget about link building for a moment. A highly optimized article is good “on-page” SEO. That means keywords are important - very important - but not the most important thing. You also need to think about your article title - which is critically more important than keyword density - as well as subheadings within the article, ordered and unordered lists, and font characteristics (bold, italics, etc.).
You don’t want to bold or italicize your keywords just for the sake of adding characteristics that you think the search engines will love. You want to do so when it’s important to the reader. For instance, I like to bold the first sentence of long bullet points in my lists. Or, if I list bullet points followed by an explanation of each point, I like to bold the list item before the explanation to make it stand out to the reader more. While doing that I like to see if I can squeeze a keyword into a couple of those bullet points. Just a strategy that I’ve found that works.
Bottom line: Keyword density is a fake panacea for article optimization illnesses. It is infinitely more important to write an article that is beneficial to the reader, but while doing that it is important to look for ways that you can increase your on-page (ie. internal article) SEO. Density is a small measure for that goal and one that won’t give an accurate telling.
By
allen on August 27th, 2008
Posted in Article SEO, Article Writing | No Comments »
Keywords, keywords, keywords. Everyone knows what they are, but very few article marketers really know how to make them work. You don’t want to stuff your articles with keywords. Too many article writers are doing that. Instead, you want to stuff your articles with great content and pepper that content with the rose doses of keywords.
What’s that mean exactly?
There’s no optimal keyword density. Let’s just shatter that myth right now. There are good articles and there are lousy articles. Most articles online today are lousy. But just a little bit of work can turn most of those lousy articles into good ones. But how?
First, stop putting your keyword into every sentence. That doesn’t help. If you can’t write a good article without keywords then you’ll write a good one with keywords. The most important thing for any article you write is for it to be a good article with valuable content aimed at your target market. Keywords are there for optimal performance in the search engines.
I’m not saying don’t include keywords at all. I’m saying use them sparingly, but aggressively. Make sure every instance of your keyword counts. Instead of using your exact keyword phrase every time you plop one down, alter it just a little so that you give a variation on the keyword. The search engines will still recognize it as a keyword and your human readers will enjoy the article more. It’s called semantic language optimization, or semantic search metrics. Whatever you call it, it works.
