Article Marketing

The recent Panda update has had a profound effect on the weight and quality of backlinks stemming from articles. This does not mean that article marketing is no longer a viable SEO tool, it only means it requires more time and effort to obtain a quality link from an article.

Article marketing is an important part of internet marketing for your website, blog, etc.  Not only will you be able to gain more traffic from article readers but also create important backlinks that are from article directories with strong page rank.  This gives you backlinks that carry more weight and are associated with keywords, phrases and content that focus your search targets.

Article Marketing Logic

• Authoritative backlinks that carry good weight in SERPs
• Unique content that brands targeted keywords and phrases to your website
• Tap into huge traffic sources with information that leads interested consumers to your site

General Rules of Article SEO

• Must be unique content
• 300+ words to obtain worthwhile content weight for SERPs
• Keywords associated in title, first 1/4 and ending 1/4 of content
• Human “edited”, make sure the flow and information is natural, do not want an “artificial or spam” look
• Always include links to your domain; usually in author’s biography, but also in the content with keyword rich anchor text.

Now that the Panda update has been rolled out, many people feel that article marketing is dead. This is not the case. If you still follow the guidelines above and create unique well written content a backlink with your keywords as the anchor text will still benefit your website. Originally I recommended at least 300 words for an article, now I would say 500 minimum. Google is looking for authoritative sites, that means content content content. The more relevant well written material you have associated with your webpage the better. Many people still want to “spin” their articles. This technique can be used, but human written content is always better than what comes out of a “spinner”. If you spin the article incorrectly the writing will look automated and spammy. It is usually better to do it right the first time and write the content yourself or pay someone else to do it.

Not all article marketing campaigns have to be targeted directly at your site. This could be a reason some pages were effected more than others by the Panda update, but there is no way to be sure. A way to avoid this problem in the future would be to target your articles at tier two backlinks and allow Google to find the correlation manually. If you are using automated tools this is the method I would recommend as having too many article backlinks could be a red flag. But only Google has the answer to those questions. Article marketing still works, just continue writing original content that is relevant to your keywords and the links created will be beneficial. Another way I find to boost the success of article backlinks is to only submit to those directories that are PR 3 or higher. I can’t submit nearly as many articles as their are directories, so you might as well use those that give the most link juice.

Top 5 Article Directories

1. Ezinearticles.com
2. Goarticles.com
3. Articlesbase.com
4. Knol.google.com
5. Buzzle.com