Top 3 Google SEO Linking Strategies (Part 2)
Mike Small is an SEO specialist who founded and manages the SEO blog, SEOpartner.com. With hundreds of relevant postings SEO Partner focuses on the areas most important to obtaining top search engine ranking, such as link building.
Google SEO Linking Strategy Two: Write Articles on Your Website’s Topic.
Providing useful article content to readers of newsletters and article directories is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to get high quality inbound links. But even more important to some is that if you share your expertise the right way, you will likely become a recognized expert in your field in no time.
People have filled entire books on the subject of article marketing so let me just hit the highlights here. This will be enough to get you started and help your name become trusted by both publishers and readers alike. Just remember these six simple guidelines…
1.) The article has to accomplish two things. First, it has to be 100% legitimate and not contain any inflated facts or sales pitches. And second it absolutely must present real value to the reader and the publisher. Don’t ever write an article just for your sake. A solely self serving article will be immediately transparent to the publisher and to most readers. Most people understand you want something in return for sharing your knowledge and are very happy to oblige a mutually beneficial arrangement, such as a great article for a link back in your bio.
2.) Obey the rules of where you are submitting your work. This is extremely important! Don’t waste an editor or publisher’s time. Be sure to select the best, and most descriptive category possible for your submission.
3.) You can (and in my opinion, should) write in a casual, conversational style but be careful to spell check the article and review it for clarity before submitting it. Once you have written something, especially something with your name attached to it, it will be a representation of you.
4.) Make the article the appropriate length for what you have to say. Don’t drone on or cut it too short. Most article directories have guidelines about how long they like to see submissions. The same goes for newsletters. If you can’t find this info for the directory you like, sticking between 500 and 1,000 words is usually a safe bet and usually up to 1,250 is OK. If you have more to say, consider splitting it into multiple articles that deal with one specific topic each.
5.) Be brief in your bio section. If your article is well written and contains similar words to the keywords you want to be found for, 350 characters (or about 40 words) should be more than enough to tell a little about yourself, your services with one or two relevant keywords properly placed. Just be sure to use those keywords as anchor text when linking to the page that covers that keyword’s topic on your site. Many directories will let you have two links in the bio section and all allow at least one.
6.) And I saved the big one for last. Provide unique content to each article directory. Nobody wants to post duplicate content so carefully reword at least one third of the article so it is unique. This will help both the publisher and the quality of your resulting inbound links.
Big Tip: Writing dozens or even hundreds of article variations to eliminate duplicate content can take a great deal of time. Then manually submittíng them to hundreds of directories takes even longer. A nice solution is using an article distribution service that allows you to enter slight variations to specific sections of your article and then combines them in unique ways to provide unique content for the search engines and readers. I am NOT talking about a system that creates robotic substitutions based on replacing similar words from a thesaurus. That produces junk. I’m talking about a system that allows you to submit your text with alternate sentences or even whole paragraphs. This works amazingly well and can easily create over one thousand article variations based on about twenty extra minutes of your time when you submit your article. And of course, write as many variations of your bio as you can too.
One system that does a great job is available at SubmitYourArticle.com. They even review the article to ensure it is a good candidate for publication, which gives you advice from a professional editor for free. They do it to help protect their own reputation as well but the benefits to you are immeasurable.
Filed under: Webmasters
