How does article writing, publishing, or listing, help my Search Engine Optimization? Good question, I'm glad you asked. Writing, publishing, or listing articles is one of the best ways to give your rankings a boost. Let's explore what happens when you write an article and publish it in an article directory, and then we will come back to why you benefit from listing someone else's article on your site.
Writing articles:
The best way to explore this, is to take a look at an articles lifecycle. First step is to write the article.
There are many things to remember when you write the article:
- Make it informative- try to have some new information about your product or services.
- Make it as entertaining as possible- engaging the reader is going to have the best effect on the article popularity.
- Keyword rich title and content- placement of keywords associated with your products or services will benefit you, and anyone that list your article on their site. The more relevant your keywords, the more relevant sites will want to list your article. Having sites that are relevant to your products or services listing your link, is what article writing is all
about Author Bio with links- You should have one key word link, one web site name (i.e. www.mysite.com), and a call to action ( i.e. Visit us at, see for yourself, etc..) in your bio
We will explore the above, and other key factors, in other articles, for now, let's see what happens after you write the article.
Publishing:
The 2nd step is to
publish your article in as many directories, and blogs as possible. It is physically impossible to go to each article directory out there and publish your article. There are programs that can publish to many article directories at one time, however, I'm not sure about the quality of the directories they publish to. It's like advertising on a billboard located in crack town, will it ever get noticed? (unless your selling crack) You want to concentrate your efforts on high ranking directories first. This is more like a billboard on the highway just before your exit. Directories like the one where you find this article. The higher ranked directories get your article listed in search engines much faster, and carry more weight in the bio links. Then. if you want, you can publish in the lower ranked directories just to get the quantity of links back to your site. That brings us to link popularity.
Link Popularity:
This is where the real magic happens, and you can actually watch it happen in the search engines. The top four search engines are Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.com. These are the ones you will be checking your articles popularity in. Just put your articles title in quotes in the search boxes of the search engines and watch what happens. Each day you will see the pages that list your article grow. Hence, your link popularity also grows. You should check them on a regular basis, and visit the links to insure they are in fact listing the bio box, do a page view to make sure they do not have a ?index, no follow? rule in the link as well. I will get into article protection in more detail in another article.
When you see these numbers starting to drop, it is time to list it in even more directories to extend it's life.
Ok, now we understand the benefits of writing and publishing your articles in directories, let's take a look at why you should list other peoples articles on your site.
Listing Articles:
Content is the buzz word here! Content is king, and link popularity is queen when it comes to search engine optimization. The cost of link for some content is a small price to pay. You want to choose the articles you list carefully. You want articles that followed the above listed rules. Keywords are the.. umm err.. key. The more relevant the article to your product and services the better the content is considered by the S.E. spiders. Well, won't having all these outbound links hurt me? No. If you chose your articles carefully, then you are linking to sites that also have relevant content to the subject. Not to mention linking to a higher ranked site will never harm you. This is a quick way to get content for your site. You should be doing a little of both, writing and listing. Try to pick a mix of articles so that your content will be a little different from somebody doing the same thing.
When someone does a search query on a term, then all the sites with content related to that term will pop up in the top of those list. The more content you have on the subject, the more relevant the S.E. sees your site as being to the user.
Engaging your visitors is another benefit. Number of page views and visitors have a high importance to your Alexa ranking, and that has a high importance to MSN and Yahoo rankings. The more engaged the
visitor is, the more pages they view, the more pages they view, the better you conversion rate on average.
They final benefit is fresh content. Changing they articles out, or moving older ones to an archive folder, and placing new articles on the top will tell the search engines they need to visit your site often because the content is constantly changing. The more often you change the content the more often they will visit your site, the more often they visit your site. This means your pages get listed quicker, and you receive more search engine links as more of your pages get indexed, increasing your relevancy even further. RSS feeds are a great way to keep the content fresh, just remember you want to keep the articles on static pages too, especially for archiving.
I hope this article has been of use to you, and that I was able to explain the benefits of writing, publishing, and listing articles in a clear fashion.
Jim owns and operates http://www.neutonmarketing.com and has many free seo tools for site members. He also offers web site hosting, .name and domain registration. Stop in and get some free tools, and tips today.
