When we spend our money on article marketing, we concentrate on two things: 1) Persuading the wise readers of the article to visit our site; 2) doing a bit of search engine optimization for the page on our website to which we link. After all, we want to get “the most bang for our buck” when it comes to content syndication. Particularly when we outsource to a web writing service, we want to make sure that we do more than merely recover our investment. That hope is understandable, but is it wise in the long term?
Sometimes our enthusiasm for generating external links to our website’s pages and our hopes that our readers will take the bait and click through to our site gets in the way of a rather important detail. If our article marketing efforts are really going to give us the results that we anticipate (or at least dream of), those published articles must actually be discovered by our prospective readers and the fickle search engines must consider them important by the heartless math of their algorithms.
Face facts, our new article isn’t the only one being posted on EzineArticles or GoArticles on any given day. Indeed, it probably isn’t even the only article being posted that day that deals with our topic, although nobody has written as cleverly as we have of course. So how do we insure that our article rises to the attention of the readership above all of that clearly inferior competition?
We, you and I, are fully aware of the standard tips for article marketing submissions:
* Use a descriptive title and, if possible, make it “catchy.”
* Tag the article with keywords that are popular and that are actually used in the article.
* On EzineArticles or other directories which offer us an opportunity to provide an abstract, make sure that is intriguing, so that the reader will want to click to the entire article.
While all of the suggestions are valid, they do not go quite far enough. We have to take another step, add another recommendation to our standard list in order for the major search engines to provide our article with the respect that we know it deserves. After all, most of our potential readers will find our article by means of a search engine. Only then can they be emotionally moved by our prose. Only then will they follow the link to our site. Only then will they repeated buy our product and service. Only then will we become as wealthy as King Midas as we sit around in our pajamas, working from home only fifteen minutes a day. Oops, I think I may have read a bit too much hype from the make money from home scams. I offer you my sincere regrets for getting carried away.
What makes the search engines respect content? Links. Multiple links. Links with similar and accurate anchor text. And…how do we get those links?
We need to dedicate a portion of our article marketing plan to building links for our articles, themselves. Yes, that may mean somewhat fewer links to our site, but the trade is that linking to our articles that do lead to our site become more powerful.
Most of us should probably assign about 20% to 35% of our article marketing content to providing external links directly to our previously published articles. Here’s and example of what I mean: Every once in a while, post an article on EasyArticles that has links to your two or three of your articles on EzineArticles and GoArticles. Use an ArticleDashboard article to link directly to a master work that have have posted to ArticleMap.
I know this seems as if it is a cycle that never ends. It is. That’s why so many of us make our overall strategy clear to the professionals and let them do the actual work and tracking. That outsourcing approach leave us plenty of time to sit around home in our pajamas counting our money.
Tags: article marketing, article syndication, content syndication, external links, linking, links, seo