A recent study by Vitis PR discovered that “IdeaMarketers.com, PR Zoom and Business Services UK were the best websites for building links, as they provided some free SEO benefit by providing links and allowing users to tailor the anchor text.” Click here for the report.

Answer: It sounds to me that the problem here is conversion — or lack thereof. Before you go either route, you need to get a compelling call to action in your articles that makes it a “must click” for the person to go to your site. Poorly created spinner articles (in any quantity) are never going to help you do that. Well-crafted articles that engage the reader and make them want to go to your site for more are what you need.  Work on increasing your conversion rate from article to visit to signup to purchase, and then go from there.

Q. How can an article stuffed with keywords attract readers?

A. In short, it can’t! In the past keyword stuffing an article would get that article picked up by search engines for the phrase being stuffed into it, but sites like Google and others are getting smarter all the time. Still putting your keyword phrase into your title, summary and article is a smart thing to do — in moderation. But over-stuffing makes readers leave skid marks. They take one look at the garbage and click off the page. It does you absolutely no good.

Always put your reader first. Manipulation tactics may work for a while, but they never last long as search engines tweak their algorithms to side-step them. Writing for the reader is always best practice.

Q. I’ve written and submitted over a hundred articles, but am seeing no increase in traffic.  Help!

A. First, make sure you haven’t made a typo in your web address. Click on your links in your article and make sure they work and lead to your site. Make sure your hyperlink syntax is correct in any links you embed within your article or within your resource box. Here’s a typical hyperlink syntax:

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>Your hyperlinked phrase here</a>

Make sure the double quotes in the code are standard straight quotes and not smart quotes imported from Microsoft Word or some other wordprocessing program.

Second, have a compelling call to action that makes people want to visit your site. For example, if your article is about “How to Fix a Leaky Faucet” you could link people over to a free ebook on “How to Save Money on Home Repairs.” Then link the person directly over to the exact URL on your site about this free ebook. Don’t make visitors hunt for the information on your site.

Too many people have no call to action with their article. They put something like, “John Doe is a writer/consultant. To learn more about him go to his web site.”  Honestly, most people don’t care about learning more about you. They want something to be in it for them!  Give them an incentive to follow through and go to your site, and that incentive should be directly related to the article. This may mean having multiple incentives and matching your articles to those incentives.

We operate a G-rated site at IdeaMarketers and enforce it strictly. We do not accept gambling, porn-related, adult-related, or offensive content. If we wouldn’t want our kindergartner reading it, then we will pull it.

We also insist that information entered be an actual article or press release and not an advertisement. Many people try to abuse our system by putting short keyword stuffed ads into our system as articles. This results in us removing the entire writer account and all the items posted within it. So don’t bother doing that!

While we are strict about content, we are more lenient than other content directories about how many links you can put to your site within an article or you bio. We do not set a limit, but hope that you would use this option judiciously. Too many links doesn’t help you anyway.

We also allow you to embed object code within your articles. So if you’d like to include a video or an audio embed code in your article, we are open to that. It just needs to be G-rated content.

For full list of our terms and conditions, go here.

If you ever need free content for your web site, newsletter, ezine, or print publication, IdeaMarketers.com has over a half a million articles on hundreds of subjects. You can use it in a myriad of ways — via our handy newsletter builder or through RSS feeds or PHP feeds that actually stream the articles into your site. Learn more about obtaining free content.

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:

• increases your chances of having your article (and thus your web site) picked up by spidering search engines ;
• increases the chances of your article being picked up by webmasters, editors and print publications, because it’s more prominently placed on our site;
• 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;
• 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.