Article marketing

Article marketing has been used by professionals for nearly as long as mass print has been available. In paper-print form (as opposed to online forms), article marketing is utilized commonly by business owners as a means of obtaining free press space. A local business provides useful content to the newspaper free of charge, and in return the newspaper prints the business’ contact information with the article. Because newspapers and other traditional media are expected to present content on limited budgets, this arrangement is generally advantageous for all parties involved.

For example, an accounting firm may market itself by writing an article entitled “The Top 50 Ways to Keep From Being Audited” and offering it to the local newspapers several weeks prior to tax season. Similarly, a roofing company may offer radio stations a concise article entitled “How to Avoid Ice Damage to Your Homes Roof this Winter” shortly before the winter season.

Online Article Marketing

With the rise of e-commerce and Internet marketing, article marketing has made a move to the online world as well. As in traditional forms of media, online article marketing has served the dual role of providing publishers with what amounts to free content, and advertisers with similarly free advertising.

The website where an author can post an article is known as an article directory. The primary reason an author can post an article without cost is that the directory owner places advertising on each article page and collects the revenue generated from the advertising. The article directory site gradually increases its own search engine popularity as more articles are posted, benefiting both the author and the directory owner with increased visitor numbers and therefore article page views.

However unlike the off-line version, there are additional dimensions to article marketing online. Most notable among the differences is the use of articles for search engine optimization. Articles are written to target particular keyword niches, and distributed to content publishers that cater to those markets. Authors are able to target their audience with informative content, sent to an already-interested group of readers.

Many online article marketers enjoy the low cost of this type of advertising and so have written hundreds and sometimes thousands of articles. One online article writer has written 13,000 articles. These prolific article authors also enjoy abundant backlinks (i.e., links pointing back to the business’ website). When the articles are distributed via RSS, the exposure to the authoring business and number of backlinks is increased greatly.

Because of this, article marketing has been the victim of junk content over the past few years. It’s important that article marketers be careful not to abuse the Internet and post poor quality content on the web just for promotional purposes; smart article marketers use scientifically proven techniques that dig deep into their own businesses and their readers’ concerns and needs and tactfully persuades them to click through to their web sites.

Another article marketing option available is where the author can choose to take control of the advertising space on the page where his article is posted. With this option the author has the choice to either have no advertising to compete with the article, or to have control over the advertising on the page along with the revenue generated.

Article marketing and search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) deals with the order in which webpages are ranked when keywords or phrases are typed into search engines. The higher a page is ranked, the more likely that page will draw a greater number of site visitors. For company websites, increased traffic often translates into increased sales, and article marketing has proven to be useful and effective for several leading Internet marketing ventures.

One method of SEO encompasses the idea that a website’s rank in search engines will rise as it obtains more backlinks. Therefore, writing and distributing articles that contain a link to a business owner’s website within the bio box should result in more links back to that website. Theoretically this process will increase that website’s rank within search engines. This theory has led to a trend in online marketing toward writing articles solely for SEO purposes, and are commonly referred to as reprint articles. This trend has been matched by a wide selection of article marketing directory websites which accept, vet, and provide redistribution of such articles to online publishers.

The free distribution of articles has, however, led to a large amount of duplicated content appearing on websites across the Internet. The quality of articles can also suffer as some authors seek a large quantity of backlinks at the possible expense of content quality.

Recently new article sites have been appearing on the internet, sites such as FreeTrafficSystem and ArticleRanks change the way that traditional article marketing works. Instead of low quality and duplicate articles being published all over the web, these systems allow articles to be spun and then distributed onto real peoples blogs and sites.

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Today I’m going to discuss about the risks and issues of off-page over optimization.

#1 Building Link Too Fast Too Many

When we’re acquiring inbound links, it’s very easy to get them too fast too many. Link building is a tedious process and you can say it as a painful process. In order to simplify the process, many people start to use third party services to automate the process such as automated directory and article submission.

The original idea of these third party automated services is good but you need to understand how they work before you employ them as part of your optimization process. The truth is many of them do not allow you to control the number of submission per day. Some automated services submit your links and articles to all directory in one shot. This is a big big mistake and Google is going to penalize you.

The recommended daily submission rate is between 1 and 10. Today you can have the rate equal to 5 and tomorrow you can make it 10. By using this approach, you can make your link acquiring process natural. This is what search engines want.

#2 Unnatural Link Distribution

Unnatural link distribution is another issue in off-page over optimization.

Let’s look at one example. Assume you have 100 websites linking to you. But all of them also have links pointing to each other. This looks very unnatural for visitors as well as search engines. It’s like your website is included in some kind of link farm.

The recommendation is getting quality 1 way incoming links and they do not have inter-connection which can form a loop.

#3 Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

The last risk I would like to discuss is unnatural anchor text distribution.

In point 1, I talked about mass submission of links and articles. It’s not going to give you links too fast and too many, but it will also make your anchor text unnaturally. If those service providers only allow you to have 1 anchor text for all submission. Then you need to be alert.

The natural anchor text distribution is not all your incoming links are using same anchor text. Perhaps some of them are using your brand name, some of them are using your blog post title. As a human being, everybody can insert different anchor text when they’re linking to you. So be sure to use different anchor text when you’re building inbound link from now onwards.

Conclusion

The risk of off-page over optimization is often overlooked by many webmasters. By understand the issues mentioned above, you can make sure you’re not accidentally hurting yourself by going too far with your off-site SEO efforts.

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