Archive for the ‘Article SEO’ Category

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Michiel Van Kets of manual-submissions.com brought up some critical points regarding my last post. While I don’t agree with everything he said, he did make a good point about WHY submission services link back to the original article. They’re trying to tell Google that they had it first. They’re trying to protect against duplicate content penalization and claim first use of the article. Since ideamarketers.com is the longest running article directory on the Web (Dec 1998) and it does receive several million page views per month, it is considered a high authority site and usually brings up higher search results. So, I can understand their concern.

Yet it still doesn’t give the end user a good experience to be led away to a duplicate copy of an article for more information, nor does it best serve the writer who isn’t able to “strike while the iron is hot.”

SO… I came up with a solution.  (Criticism is the mother of invention.) I’ve programmed our site to recognize if the “more information” url is a link to a major submission service. If it is, it will link to the default URL on the writer profile for more information and then at the bottom of the article, it will say, “This article was submitted by a submission service.” That phrase will then link to the duplicate copy on the submission service’s site.

This should satisfy the submission service, the author, the end user, and Google. If you use a submission service that links back to a copy of the article on their site, you’re welcome to comment below with the name of that service and I’ll add it to the programming so it will be handled appropriately.

I might add, that many times the default URL on your writer profile will NOT be the URL you want to link an article to. In this case, ideally you’d put a specific URL within your site in the blank we provide in the article-level custom resource box.

If you own or work for a submission service, you’d be better off letting the writer have their specific URL in the custom resource box and hard-code a link (using html) to your original copy at the bottom of the body of the article. This way you’d be covering your own interests and those of your customers.

Many people use article submission services to save time when submitting articles to article directories. And that’s ok. But there is one thing you’ll want to be aware of. It’s nothing malicious, but it is incredibly ineffective for you as the writer who’s working hard to churn out quality articles and then paying someone to submit them for you.

We’ve noticed a pattern among articles submitted by article submission sites to IdeaMarketers.com . Every article in our system is allowed to have a URL associated with it. We link your primary keyword phrase to this URL. We tell people to go there for more information when they read your article. This URL SHOULD link to your site for more information about the article subject. This is your chance to get people to your site to sign up for your list and perhaps one day purchase from you.

The problem with some of the article submission services is that they don’t fill in this blank with your site’s URL. They fill it in with a URL on THEIR site which contains an exact duplicate of the article being submitted.  This means someone who has just read your article is going to be linked off to read it again on another site! They don’t want this. They want MORE information about you.

If you use an article submission service, I’d recommend logging into IdeaMarketers, go to the Article/PR Admin menu, click on Edit/View and edit your articles. Make sure the custom resource box links to a URL on your site for more information about the article’s subject. Better yet, ask your article submission service if they will fill in this blank with a URL on your site.

I’ve posted a 2nd part to this post here.

Does bidding make a big difference in how much your articles get picked up and distributed or syndicated?

Answer

First, let me explain that articles on IdeaMarketers are sorted first from highest to lowest bidder and then by the expiration date of the bid (or the date the article was submitted if there’s no bid on the article). This gives top bidders prominent positioning on the most popular pages of the site – the home page and the channel pages. The top bid articles also recommended on other articles that are in the same broad channel category. For example, the top 8 bid articles in the Business category will appear on all business-related articles.

In relation to syndication and distribution, bidding for article promotion does the following:

1. increases your chances of having your article (and thus your web site) picked up by spidering search engines ;
2. increases the chances of your article being picked up by webmasters, editors and print publications, because it’s more prominently placed on our site;
3. increases the chances of having your article syndicated through our category syndication. The articles we stream out to other sites are sorted first by bid amoun and then by date. We syndicated out roughly 3 million page views each month to other web sites. Bidding helps bring you toward the top of those syndication feeds;
4. increases the chances of having your own syndicated column picked up because if you have a bid running on at least one of your articles, we promote you as a syndicated columnist on your profile, your articles, and also on www.SyndicatedWriters.com

To learn more about the bidding process, go here.

As the creator of www.IdeaMarketers.com, I’ve noticed that many writers neglect to take full advantage of three important pieces of information when entering their articles into IdeaMarketers.com: the summary and the keywords.

Did you know that IdeaMarketers uses these four pieces of information to help you get better search engine positioning and build link popularity? That’s right! You have control over the meta tags on IdeaMarketers! Our programming takes your primary keyword phrase plus the title you give your article to compose the title tag in the
meta tags. We use your summary for the description tag and your keywords for the keywords tag. With this
knowledge, you have power to influence your search engine positioning! Here’s how:

1. Choose relative keywords and phrases that you think people will enter on Google or other spidering engines. Use these same keywords or phrases your primary keyword phrase, keywords and summary. It would also help to use them in the body of your article to increase their pulling potency. (Don’t overdo it though. There’s no need to put your phrase more than once every 100 words or so.)
2. Write a summary that gives a good description of your article and include the words from your primary keyword phrase somewhere in the summary..
3. Write a title that’s catchy and will grab someone who is looking through search engine results.
4. To maximize the potential of your article being noticed by search engine spiders, purchase a bid for placement high enough to put your article on the IdeaMarketers home page or at least on the channel pages. Spiders frequent IdeaMarketers because it is incredibly popular. When it sees your article on the home page, it knows it’s important! It will follow the link, pick up your tags and place your article in a prominent position
   on the search engines.

Please note that IdeaMarketers.com has no control over search engine positioning. We cannot guarantee positions. We are only going by data we’ve seen on existing articles and their positioning based on keywords they’ve selected. Remember that how high you come up on the search engines depends upon the popularity of the keywords or phrases you chose. If there’s lots of competition for the keywords you select, your article may get lost in a sea of links. Try to choose keyword phrases that are popularly searched, but aren’t popularly used by other marketers. Google offers a
free keyword search tool to help you search for keyword popularity.

I’m writing this article to stress the importance of choosing your primary keyword phrases and article titles wisely for article marketing. I had an IdeaMarketers bidder write me to say his site wasn’t receiving traffic from search engines. I investigated the situation and found that when I searched for his article’s primary keyword phrase on Google, he actually had the top four natural listings for his article and Web site! He was getting better search engine placement. Unfortunately, his primary keyword phrase wasn’t something anyone would think to search for.

Bottom line, his article promotion was a waste. While IdeaMarketers and Google were doing their thing, it didn’t create results because very few (if any) searches would ever be made for his primary keyword phrase.I recommend that you always think about your typical visitor and their needs when crafting your title, keywords, summary and the article itself.

Title

Choose a title that is descriptive and tells the reader what the article is about. Pay special attention to the first three words of your title. These should be a phrase that people actually search for. While catchy phrases are cute, they may not accurately depict what’s inside the article. They probably aren’t what someone would think to search for either. Also, don’t make your title so keyword-stuffed or technical that no one would understand it. You need to strike a balance between readability and phrases that people would search for.

MSN loves article titles. Most bidders on IdeaMarketers who bid high enough to be on the home page, in time will find their exact title coming up in the top results of MSN. On any search engine the title is important because it helps the searcher decide whether they want to click or not.

Keywords

The keywords you select when adding/editing an article are a list of comma separated words or phrases you think people might search for to find your article. These come into play when someone does a keyword search on IdeaMarketers. They also appear in the keywords meta tag for the article page. (Meta tags are what search engines read on a web page to determine its content.)

Use Google’s Keyword selection tool for ideas.

Primary Keyword Phrase

Even more important than the keywords is the primary keyword phrase we let you enter for your article. This displays on our home page and channel pages. It links to your article. Your primary keyword phrase also links straight from your article to your Web site. Search engines look at these linked phrases in determining link popularity and how far you come up in their listings for that phrase. Being linked off the home page and channel pages of IdeaMarketers for a primary keyword phrase is considered a high-value link and will weigh heavily in your favor. Choose this phrase wisely. It should be something people will actually search for. Don’t just haphazardly throw something in this blank. You’re wasting a lot of power (and bid dollars) if you do.

Also, don’t choose a phrase that is too broad. For example, the competition for the phrase “real estate” is tremendous; whereas you will have a better chance at a top listing for “real estate investment course” or “Chattanooga real estate.”

Summary

Your summary is your “elevator speech” – your chance to grab the searcher’s attention in a sentence or two. It appears on IdeaMarketers as a description with your article title, as well as in the meta tags, and eventually as the summary associated with your article on many search engines. Include somewhere in your summary, the same primary keyword phrase that you had in your title. Use the summary wisely to effectively describe what readers can expect from your article. Don’t ever leave this blank!

The Article

Once the visitor has made it to your article, make sure you retain their attention. It’s your goal to impress, instruct, and enlighten them so much that they will want to visit your Web site. Articles aren’t advertisements and they aren’t blobs of keyword-stuffed text. Not only will the visitor instantly leave your article if it’s nothing but an ad or keyword jumble, but also they’ll probably look at your name and make a mental note never to do business with you.

Your article simply must be credible, well-written, properly formatted and grammatically correct. People want to do business with people who are intelligent and trustworthy. Steve Martin used to do an old stand-up routine where he compared “Fidelity Bank and Trust” to “Fred’s Bank.” Where would you rather put your money?

The same goes for article promotion. The quality and credibility of your article reflects upon you and your professionalism. I was speaking to one of our long-time contributors who got her start writing articles several years ago on IdeaMarketers. Now she’s a columnist for a print journal and has an agent for her innovative business book. But that never would have happened for her if she hadn’t put quality and professionalism first. While search engine rankings and positioning are important, never sacrifice quality for keyword-stuffing nonsense.

Follow these tips and you’ll see better results – both in better search engine placement and in your long-run reputation for credibility and professionalism.To submit your articles to IdeaMarketers, go here to get a writer account. Or if you already have a writer account, you can log in here.