SEO Expert

Posts Tagged ‘link building’

Building and promoting a new website isn’t easy. The first thing you need to know, is to learn how to drive organic search traffic using SEO.

SEO is short for search engine optimization. It is a process that combines off-site and on-site optimization to allow you to get higher search engine rankings.

In the search engine world, if you don’t rank on the first page of the search results, your site doesn’t exist. Visitors must be able to see your URL in the search results when they want to search for relevant information. So how do you ensure your site gets ranked at the top?

It will take a whole book to explain the entire SEO process properly. But for the sake of discussion, we will just list the most important component – which is off-site optimization. Off-site SEO sounds like a complex hi-tech phrase, but it’s actually very easy to implement. It involves building back links with relevant anchor texts.

Assuming that you have already done your keyword research, you would know what keywords to go for. For instance, if you are trying to rank for the phrase “seo guide”, then your links must contain the words “seo guide”. Don’t try to use phrases like “click here”, or “visit website”.

Problem is, since these links are posted in external sites, how do you ensure that the proper anchor texts are used?

One way you can do so is to use a blog posting service. A blog posting service allows you to pick your desired anchor texts. Here is how it works.

Step 1: Choose a high quality blog network. Sometimes, services that promise thousands of blog posts may be lacking in quality. After all, who is going to promote the thousands of blogs? Go for quality, then quantity.

Step 2: Once you sign up with the service, you will then post your blog entry. Most services require your article length to be at least 300 words. Just write naturally, and you will be able to generate that article length easily. Also, keep in mind that there is no need to resort to keyword stuffing. Write as if you are writing for a human reader.

Step 3: Make sure you insert your links properly with your desired anchor texts. Note that the service provider will not format the links for you. So you must remember to format all links properly with HTML tags. Most services will allow you to include between two to three links.

Step 4: Your article will then be approved for distribution. There is nothing more to do on your part. Just sit back and wait for the blog posting report to arrive. The report should contain the links to your blog posts, so you know where you links are.

Give the articles a few weeks to be indexed by the search engines. Once the articles start to age in the search engines, they will become more valuable. In a few months time, you will be able to see a boost in search engine rankings. For older sites, sometimes all it takes is a few short weeks.

FastSubmitArticles.com is announcing the release of Premium Article Submission packages for individuals, small business owners, and corporate organizations. The service will help individuals and businesses to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Companies who use the service will also receive traffic through the articles that they distribute.

In the beginning, FastSubmitArticles.com started out by offering article distribution services at an affordable rate of $6. For this fee, the Company distribute an article to over 300 well established article directories on the Internet. By utilizing the article distribution service, business owners can expect to receive traffic from links that are included in each article. For every article submitted, the author is allowed to include 2 to 3 links. When a visitor reads the article and find the content interesting, he can click on the links to find out more about the Company promoted in the author resource box.

In addition, the links will also help boost search engine rankings. Each link points to the official source of information. The search engines see this as some kind of “vote” for the official site, and learns to recognize the site as an authority site. This leads to higher rankings in the search results.

Many business owners welcome the new service because writing and submitting articles can be a very time consuming process. To write an article of professional quality will take an average of 15 minutes. The submission process takes even more time, depending on the total number of article directories involved. Due to the time consuming nature of article marketing, many business owners have decided to stay away from this traffic generation method.

With the release of the article distribution service, businesses can now outsource all their article marketing activities. With an additional $10, FastSubmitArticles.com will provide an article for the client. The client has the option to vet through, make an necessary edits, and approve the article before distribution commences. The turnaround time for distributing an article is about 3 to 4 business days.

Seeing the initial success of the service, many clients started to request for manual submission to several high page rank websites. To cater to this need, FastSubmitArticles.com has recently decide to release Premium Distribution Packages. All submissions done for premium sites are manual. If for some reason an article is rejected, FastSubmitArticles.com will work with the site editor to get the article approved.

However, problems are extremely rare. There are over 20 Premium sites (all with high page rank) included in the package. Due to the high quality content that is submitted on a daily basis, many of these Premium sites have granted FastSubmitArticles.com expert author status, which means that articles are approved instantly upon submission.

Darren Chow, the founder of the article distribution service, commented, “Since launching the premium packages, 80% of our clients are signing up for premium submissions. Although the normal distributions are much cheaper, most still see value in our Premium packages. Many business owners have seen a boost to their search engine rankings after signing up for Premium submissions.”

He then adds, “Article marketing has been a proven traffic generation method. Many marketers have achieved great success with it, and there is no reason why it wouldn’t continue to work well for others.”

To date, the Company has distributed thousands of articles on behalf of their clients. Their portfolio of clients include many successful Internet Marketers as well as well known organizations.

Ok, the post title seems a little over the board. But it says exactly what I intend to convey in this post – to show you exactly how search engine optimization works without all the frills. With a stripped down case study, you can see how article distributions can benefit your site. It doesn’t have to take long for you to get traffic. Let’s take a look at the website that we are going to examine.

If you have been with us since last year, you would have heard of the new service that I released – the Blog Content Syndication service. This service allows you to post spinnable articles to laser targeted blogs. The keyword that I was going to target was “Blog content syndication“, which describes what the site is about.

Make a search in Google for this keyword phrase: Google search – blog content syndication

You will see a result like this:

My website is ranked in the top spot for my choice of keywords. Further down, in the 5th position, you see an article in Ezinearticles that was published by me. Questions must be swimming through your head now.

Q: What link building methods did you use?

Q: Are you receiving traffic from the search engines?

Q: How long does it take to get there?

Q: What exactly did you do to get to the top spot?

I’ll give you all the answers here. Let’s try to answer one question at a time.

Q: What link building methods did you use?
I only use article marketing to build links to the site. I want this to be a case study, so I didn’t use any other link building method.

Q: Are you receiving traffic from the search engines?

Yes, I’m receiving traffic for these keywords:

* blog syndication

* blog content syndication

* content syndication

* syndicate blog content

* syndicate pricing

* …and a few other keywords.

That is why I say, never discount long tail keywords. These keywords bring me an average of 15 unique visitors a month. That works out to be about  450 visitors each and every month. Big deal you say? It may be a big deal, or it may mean nothing at all. It all depends on how you look at the numbers.

Here is what your mindset should be like.

Try to see each and every click as a human being sitting at the computer. What is he trying to do? Is he trying to search for information? Is he trying to look for some specific products and services? The keywords that bring you the traffic will reveal a lot about the intent behind the search.  That is why long tail is still valuable. How do you guess the intent behind a keyword such as “exercise equipment”? The visitor could be searching for information, or he could be looking to buy. It’s harder to tell. But if you get traffic from keyword phrases such as “exercise equipment wholesale”, it’s easier to guess the intent isn’t it?

In general, you will get more traffic from 2 keyword phrases. But you get more targeted traffic from 3 or 4 keyword phrases. Even with just a trickle of traffic from these keyword phrases, you can still make money. How? By matching the right offer to the right prospect. In other words, you have a much higher chance of converting a visitor that came from a long tail search into a buying customer.

Here is where lots of exciting things can happen.

That first time buyer has the potential to become a repeat buyer. The question is, what do you have to offer your newly acquired customer? The buyer may come to website to buy an ebook about weight training. As the business owner, you should take the time to understand more about the goals of your customers. What is he trying to achieve? Is he trying to lose weight? Or is he trying to build ripping muscles? Once you understand where your customer is going, it’s easy to find the right offers to offer your customers. You can try offering a weight loss diet plan, health supplements, coaching programs, etc. One single visitor, with the potential of spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars with you.

I don’t know about you but to me, it sounds logical (and exciting as well) to pursue targeted keyword searches. You probably won’t get to see thousands of visitors daily, but you are still making sales. This is the reason why you don’t need a lot of traffic to succeed online. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t continue building traffic. When you start seeing results, and conversions are good, find ways and means to scale up your traffic.

For every traffic source that you test, always maintain the same mindset. It’s a human being at the other end, trying to search for something. Do you have what it is that the visitor is searching for? Will he pay money for what you have? If you have done your market research, you already know the answers to these questions.

Q: How long does it take to get there?

About 4 weeks. The lesson here is this: Submit highly targeted and relevant information and you have a much higher chance of ranking quickly, and higher in the search results. Understand that the primary purpose of the search engines is to deliver highly relevant content. If you have more relevant information, products, or services than what is currently available in the search results, you have a very good chance of doing well in the serps.

From the example that I’ve given, it took just 4 weeks to rank in the top spot in Google, out of over 21 million results. And you will be surprised at the effort that I put in to achieve that ranking…which leads me to the next question.

Q: What exactly did you do to get to the top spot?

Let me break this down into a step by step guide for you. You may want to print this out or save this somewhere, just in case you need to refer to it later on.

Step 1: Choose a domain name with my target keyword phrase in it.

Step 2: Include keyword phrase in article title, and meta tags.

Step 3: I wrote 3 articles and submit them to Ezinearticles.

Step 4: I combined 2 of the articles into one 450 word article, and submitted the article using Premium Distribution. The reason why I used premium distribution is because there are more high page rank sites (20+) in the package, which will help boost the search rankings. Note that I did just ONE premium distribution.

Step 5: I wait 4 weeks for the articles to be indexed, and I checked the search results every week or so. In the first week, the site is indexed. In the second week, it rose to page one. In the third week, it rose to second in ranking. By the forth week, it has risen to ranking number 1.

Mission accomplished.

It looks simple, and it sounds too simple to be true. But SEO is that simple! I use this as a stripped down case study so that you can see for yourself, beyond a shadow of a doubt that article marketing really works! But everyday, I still see people posting comments in the forums about not ranking well in the search engines. If they can’t rank in the serps, they are doing it wrong.

Here are some of the main reasons why some sites fail to rank:

* Poor quality content.

The search engine is all about relevancy. It has to be able to determine the context (meaning) of the web page. How do you expect the search bot to do this if the web page is littered with nothing but broken English? The bot is dumb. It is programmed to work in a certain way, and it will behave predictably. In this case, it will dumb the poorly written web page.

* Choosing the wrong keywords to target.

Some keywords are easy to rank. Some are harder to rank. And some are impossible to rank. You need to be able to tell which keywords will or will not rank. You can do this just by looking at the search results. Pick any keyword you want, and make a search in Google. Then let Google tell you whether your keywords are likely to rank or not. Here are the possible scenarios.

a) Easy to rank.

You find web pages that are hardly relevant to your search phrase. This means that there is little or no relevant  content in the database. All you need to do, is to provide better, and more relevant information, and the search engines will lap it up – guaranteed.

b) Harder to rank, but not impossible.

You find lots of competition for the keywords that you are trying to target. For example, you see domain names with the keyword phrase in them. These are probably sites owned by webmasters who know all about SEO. The only way to beat them, is to build more quality inbound links. That means you need more time, effort, and perhaps money to compete in this niche. But don’t be put off just because you see lots of competition. Usually, competition is a good thing – it shows that there is money to be made in the niche. That’s why online marketers are using SEO to drive traffic. If you have a viable business, go full steam ahead and dominate the keywords.

c) Impossible to rank.

These are niches that you are better off steering clear of. They could be insurance industry, banking industry, legal sites, government sites, etc. These keywords are dominated by the big players in town, and they are the authority websites. You can try competing in the same space if you are a legitimate financial institution, bank, school, etc. But if you are just trying to sell some ebooks, use Adsense, or make some dough using CPA, you are likely to reap nothing.

* Not enough inbound links.

These are marketers who distribute just 1 article, sit back, and do nothing. And when they don’t see results, they claim that article marketing doesn’t work. You are likely to face competition with the keywords that you are trying to target. At the end of the day, your SEO efforts will come down to the number of inbound links with your target keywords as the anchor texts. Keep building links! Try to get as many inbound links as you can with your keywords in them.

Whether you rank well or not depends on just 2 things:

1) The number of links with relevant anchor texts.

2) Link juice from high quality websites – i.e. websites with high page rank.

Page rank is just Google’s way to let the world know whether the site is an authoritative site or not. But don’t discount sites with page rank zero. This is because a site may be waiting for the page rank to be updated, or the page rank indicator has been removed. Google remove page rank when it suspects the sites are trying to sell links. But these sites still rank very well in the search results. A page rank zero inbound link with relevant anchor texts is still better than having no links.

But in this case study, since I enjoy the benefits of so many high page rank websites like Ezinearticles, Squidoo, Artipot, Americanchronicle, etc…I just used a Premium distribution, and I got the first position. Whenever possible, try to get high page rank sites to link to you.

I’m working on a new Press Release service that you will you to post news on high page rank sites like EINNews, CNet, Denver Post, Daily Herald, and more…many of these sites have at least page rank 4. Some have page rank 5, or 6. The goal here is to get as many high page rank sites from different regions to link back to your site.

In fact, I’ve already completed the design of the site (check out the sleek dashboard). I’m just working on a few details right now, and the service will be released either before the end of the week, or the start of next week.

So what about the Blog Content Syndication service?

No worries. I’m still working hard on promoting the blogs. Link building has already began for all 30 blogs. Let the links age. And yes, I’m still taking orders if you are interested. Send me an email to see if we can work something out. The next 2 networks to be published are:

* Home improvement network

* Health network

Besides link building, I’m also posting additional content to the blogs (like this post you are reading now) so that the blogs appear more natural.

In the meantime, look out for an email from me with regards to the launch of the press release distribution service.

Hope you have enjoyed this post.

Take care, and have a nice week ahead.

Don’t forget to email me if you have any questions about anything (don’t have to be about business).

Darren Chow

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Every now and then, I receive emails from new article marketers asking me how to build links with article marketing. The emails come through from my article distribution service, which I’m still running. For more experienced marketers, writing and submitting articles is just like walking or running. But for new marketers, it’s like walking through a thick jungle – i.e., it’s easy to get lost.

So here is a simple guide for all new article marketers. Use this as a blue print to guide you. Article marketing can be very effective in boosting your search engine rankings. You just need to know what to do.

Link Building Guide for New Article Marketers

1) Prepare a list of article directories.

Don’t worry about writing articles just yet. The first thing you need is a list of high quality article directories. There are several such lists loitering around on the Internet. Just make a quick search for “list of article directories.” Many directories may be defunct now. So you need to scrape those sites from your list.

If you are hiring someone else to do the job for you, make sure that the list is well maintained. You don’t want to hire a service that promises to submit your articles to 1000+ directories but only 300 directories are online. We’ll discuss more about outsourcing later on.

2) Prepare your articles.

If you are starting a new website, you need a lot of momentum to get things going. That means writing and submitting AT LEAST a couple of hundred articles. Don’t shoot for 5 or 10 articles. Each article normally averages around 10 – 20 unique visitors per month. If you only have 10 articles published, that’s not going to amount to a lot of traffic. You probably make 1 sale a month – nothing to get excited about. And that’s not going to replace your full time income either.

Very soon, you are more likely to give up on your online venture. Have enough faith and confidence to forge ahead. Article marketing is a time tested method that has been proven to work for many marketers. There is no reason why it will not work for you. Instead of just writing and submitting a handful of articles, prepare to write two hundred articles.

If you are doing this on your own, split up the work load. Write just 10 articles a day for one whole month. You will have 200 articles by the end of the month. That will give you a substantial amount of traffic to work with.

Your articles should not be less than 450 words. You should be writing with the goal of driving traffic to your websites. That means you shouldn’t give away all your content. Talk about the problems that your prospects are likely to face, then drive them to your blog or sales page. Encourage them to click on your links.

Usually, you are allowed to include 2 links to your website. Use a proper URL, and link to a website that you have control over. Don’t use affiliate links in your author box. If you are promoting an affiliate product, drive the traffic to your own sites, then redirect the traffic to the affiliate offer. Remember, your author resource box is where you advertise your products and services. Think of it as a classified ad. You can promote a free ebook, a free download, or whatever. Do whatever you can to encourage the click through.

From my experience, if you do this right, you will see an average click through rate of between 15% to 20%. One more thing about including links in your resource box: when you are submitting articles, you are actually engaged in the process of link building. And link building is important in any SEO campaign. You are already engaged in SEO, whether you know it or not, so use proper anchor texts in your links. You can use URLs as your links if you are not concerned with SEO. You will still get a fair amount of traffic.

But since you are already putting in all that hard work, why not get more traffic from the search engines along the way? Do your keyword research and choose some keywords with search traffic to target. Then make sure you include those keywords as your anchor texts.

3) Submitting your articles.

Start with Ezinearticles.com. EZA is the top article directory on the Internet. In Jan. 09, they announced that they drove 5.1 million clicks to member websites. That’s a lot of clicks. Those clicks must be going somewhere. Can you imagine how much you would be spending if you are to buy those clicks? You don’t have to spend a single dime to get traffic to your sites when you submit articles to EZA.

The reason why you should start with EZA is because they have very strict rules about original content. Original content means that your article must not be published elsewhere. Don’t go post the articles in your blogs before they get approved by EZA. Just be patient and wait for them to approve your articles. EZA accept articles from 250 words onwards, so writing and submitting 10 articles per day is definitely doable. You can always combine the articles to lengthen them for other article directories later on.

Once EZA has approved your articles, you can start to distribute your articles to other article directories. Most of the directories won’t mind having quality articles on their sites, even when those articles have already been published by EZA. As long as you own the rights to those articles, they will be approved. Also, make sure you lengthen the articles to at least 450 words. Most article directories won’t accept articles that are shorter than that. Submit to as many directories as you can. The more sites you submit to, the more inbound links you get. If you are promoting a brand new site, wait 4 to 6 weeks for the search engines to index your articles. You will see your rankings improve dramatically in the search results. I have personally seen this happen for many new sites.

4) Rinse and repeat.

To grow the traffic levels of your website, simply rinse and repeat the above process. Keep writing and submitting to EZA. Once approved, submit to the other article directories. Make link building a habit. Always remind yourself that if you are not building links, you are making it easy for your competitor to overtake you.

Many article marketers tend to kick back and relax when they see their rankings rise in the search results. But after a few weeks, they lost their rankings. Why? Because while they are sitting back doing nothing, their competitors have been busy building links. Ever seen sites with 10k backlinks or more? How did that happen? Obviously, it didn’t happen overnight. Whoever own those sites have been working on acquiring backlinks on a consistent basis. As they continue to work hard to get more links, they are enjoying the cumulative effect. That’s how they build monster sites with tens of thousands of back links. But when you are new, you are like a little fish swimming in the ocean. So don’t rest on your laurels even when you see your sites starting to rank well. Continue to be an aggressive link builder.

5) Outsourcing.

Let’s be brutally honest. Writing doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Some people, after writing just 1 article, start to feel vexed and frustrated. It’s almost impossible for them to write 10 articles on a daily basis. After just one or two days, the individual burns out. For these people, writing is too painful to be carried out on a daily basis.

Then there is the lengthy submission process. The submission process can be very time consuming. If you are trying to submit your articles manually, it will take you a couple of hours just to submit 1 article to a hundred article directories. Even if you use software to help you submit articles, you still have to leave your computer on for the software to function. The most painless and convenient option would be to outsource everything, including article writing and submission. When you outsource, all you do is place an order, submit some information for article writing, and then you go do your own stuff. You don’t even have to be in front of the computer.

You will then be allowed to view and approve the articles. Once approved, the service provider will commence distribution. Contrary to popular belief, outsourcing these days is quite affordable. Article marketing is more reasonably priced than most SEO packages. Have you seen how much SEO packages cost these days? The price can be sky high. It seems only those with deep pockets can afford SEO services these days.

If you are looking for a cheaper option, perhaps article marketing may just be the solution for you. I own and run an article distribution service, so I’m obviously biased. But you don’t have to take my word for you. Take the information in this guide, use it, and see the results for yourself. You can always consider reinvesting some of those profits that you will be making when you see some good results.

Hopefully you will remember this post when that happens, and come back to share with everyone what you have managed to accomplish.

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As the owner of a professional article distribution service (I do this everyday), I have the benefit of reviewing and submitting hundreds of articles each month.

As you probably already know, article submission is just one way to build links online. The major problem with article marketing is that it can be rather painful. Consider people who don’t write well, type slowly, or don’t know how to use software to help automate the submission process. Writing and submitting one article can take hours!

On top of that, if you don’t follow the rules, your articles may get rejected, and you’re just wasting time, writing and submitting your articles.

Here are some general guidelines. If you follow these guidelines, you will yield the best results.

WHAT NOT TO DO

* Submit articles with less than 450 words.

Most article directories accept articles with at least 450 words. Some may accept more, some less. But most will accept 450 words.

* Promote a site with nudity of excessive affiliate links.

It’s not common for article directories to reject a site that has been completed. But if you are trying to promote an adult site, or if your site contains nothing but affiliate links, your articles have a chance of being rejected.

* Use super long anchor keyword phrases.

Keep your anchor texts to 3 words max. Don’t link the entire sentence. Keep the links to your author resource box. The author resource box should not be more than 450 characters. 450 characters will allow you to write about 2 to 3 sentences. There is no need to write a short story here. Just a couple of sentences with static text links in them will do.

* Use profanity in your articles.

Don’t use any kind of profanity in your articles. Vulgar words and phrases are automatically detected by some article directories. Your articles will be rejected before they have a chance to be reviewed by a human editor.

* Submit an illegible article.

Articles are seldom disapproved because of grammatical errors, spelling errors, or sentence structure faults. But it has to be of decent quailty. In other words, readers must understand what you are trying to say. If English is not your native language, consider hiring someone to write for you.

* Use software to spin articles.

Some article marketers use software to spin PLR (Private Label Rights) articles, in the hope that the article directories won’t detect the duplicate content. Unfortunately, most software just replace words with synonyms. In the process, the meaning is skewed and the article no longer make sense. For instance, the word “market” may mean several different things depending on context.

Consider:

Original sentence: I go to the stock market to invest.

After replacement: I go to the stock bazaar to invest.

OR: I go to the stock shop to invest.

The word “market” may mean “bazaar” or “shop” – a place for buying stuff. But when you put the words into context, notice that the same sentence now sounds funny.

* Use URL as your links.

You shouldn’t be using URLs as your links. The bulk of your traffic will be coming from the search engines. So make sure you spend a little time working on your keyword research, and pick some phrases to target. Use those keywords in your links.

* Write and submit an entire report.

You are submitting articles, not reports. Every now and then, I see writers submitting articles with over a thousand words. If you have long articles, break them up into separate articles. You are not posting to your blog. You are building links with your articles. More articles equal more links.

In addition, most readers just scan articles instead of read the entire page. If you write super duper long articles, you may lose your reader, and you never get the chance to see them again.

WHAT TO DO

* Write and submit articles regularly.

If you are not building links, your competitor may just be creeping up on you. So make it a habit to distribute articles regularly – even if it’s just one article per week.

* Submit to hundreds of article directories.

Don’t just submit to 1 or 2 article directories. Start with Ezinearticles.com. Once approved, you can use the same articles to distribute to all the article directories.

* Outsource of use software to help you distribute articles.

It doesn’t make sense to sit at the computer for hours just to distribute articles. You have better things to do. Outsource all the article submissions or use some software to automate the process. Your article marketing will become way less painful.

A word of caution if you are hiring writers to write for you. Use a duplicate content check tool like CopyScape to check for plagarism before paying your writers. Some writers are just out to scam others – they scrape content off other websites and submit them as their own. Don’t be fooled!

* Focus on keywords.

Try to dilute your efforts by targeting too many keywords at any one time. Focus on two or three keywords, and write your articles based on those keywords. Once they start to rank in the search engines, move on to other keywords.

Notice that there is a cumulative effect. The more keywords you target, the more traffic you will get. But be patient. SEO does take a little bit of time, especially for competitive keywords.

* Publish 100% original articles.

Using PLR articles is fine. But many directories (like Ezinearticles) will not accept PLR articles. You have to be prepared to accept that if you are using PLR articles. Otherwise, you just have to write 100% orginal and unique articles. Unique means that your articles must not be published on the Internet before. So don’t make the mistake of posting to your blog, and then submit the articles. Once the articles get indexed by the search engines, Ezinearticles may not approve the articles.

* Be clear about your goals.

What are you trying to achieve? If you just want to build links, you can submit general information articles. If you are trying to sell something, focus on the products and talk more about the problems that your products will help to solve. Don’t give away all the answers in your articles. In that 450 words, show that you understand the customers, and that you are sincere in helping them overcome whatever obstacles they are facing. That will encourage them to click your links and visit your site.