Your articles won’t amount to a hill of beans if the audience doesn’t want to read them. Even if the content is for SEO purposes only, a person will quickly press the back button if they discover they’re looking at useless informationor even that the writing is difficult to follow.
This means that your content should have ALL of the components of a great article. One that’s easy to read, even easier to scan, and has information worth reading. How do you do this? Let’s start with the basics of writing.
KISS
Perhaps the ‘keep is simple stupid’ rule has become clich
Tags: articles, content, writing
Building link popularity is one of the most important elements of search engine optimisation and also one of the most time-consuming. It amazes me that I still receive countless emails from so called SEO experts inviting me to participate in link exchanges. Some of them even offering to swap links with a site totally unrelated to what we do! No wonder our industry comes under such fire.
Let’s go back to basics and understand the concept of linking. Linking in its simplest form is about taking a user on a stage in their online journey, whether it be to find a product, piece of news and information or to learn something new. Now most of the time we know what we are looking for online, so our session has a goal, and with that goal in mind we look to trawl the web and put our trust in navigating around websites till we achieve our goal. Sometimes it can take minutes and a straight forward visit to a search engine and a destination site, other times it can takes us hours, with a journey that takes us in and out of a number of different websites.
Now if you keep that concept in mind when thinking about link building you’ll soon realise that the ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ approach to building link popularity is fundamentally flawed. Links should be awarded on merit and not through back scratching.
Seeking out link exchanges is an inefficient use of your time
What I am going to tell you next is going to transform the way you approach building link popularity. Let’s take a look at a classic link swap scenario. You first of all spend a few days looking for sites that have link swap directories on their website. You contact the webmaster explaining that you would like to engage in a link exchange. The webmaster agrees to link to you once you have placed a link back to his site first. You set up the link and email the webmaster. You visit the site to check your link and you find your link buried deep within the site on a page that has a low page rank and surrounded by 50 other web links. You then repeat the process with another site. Now here comes the killer, you’ve spent all that time building up those links, a few months later you return to some of the site’s where your link was placed and you find that some of them have been removed. You get in touch with the webmasters and ask them why your link has been removed. They get back to you and tell you it was an accident. Yeh right, they removed the link deliberately so they could gain a one way link from you. After a few months has passed you notice that your link popularity has not increased in Google - so again you revisit some of the sites that were linking to you and check your links (or by now you might have bought some link checking software to do that for you). You see that your links are still there, but you’ve read that sometimes webmaster’s adopt sneaky techniques to prevent the search engine spiders from following the link. Low and behold you see within the source code of one site that they are using a “nofollow” tag on the link.
Now tell me is all this effort worth it? Link exchanges open up a new can of worms for you - coming into contact with black hat SEOs!
Now consider the opposite. Why not spend the time on creating compelling content or interactive tools that people will naturally want to link to. Not only are they likely to provide you with a link from a page that is likely to be visited, but it will be a one way link, and a few one way links from respected websites are worth more than 50 reciprocals, take my word for it. Plus you’ll have something of real value on your site that visitors will use and may even tell other people about. With this approach to link building you’ll generate more ‘noise’ about your website and encourage other website owners to link to you, because you’ll have something on your own site, that will be of interest to their own visitors.
With link building it’s better to think about building a name for yourself and focus on growing your online reputation as opposed to growing your list of reciprocal link partners. So the message is clear: ‘quality over quantity’ is what counts when it comes to growing link popularity.
Damon Lightley is a director at search engine marketing specialists, SiteVisibility. SiteVisibility helps its clients attract, convert and retain profitable customers through their websites.
For more information on link building visit SiteVisibility
Tags: article submission, articles, email, email marketing, email newsletter, ezine, publishing, writers, writing“Where do I get article ideas?”
That’s the most common question I get from fellow writers looking to break into article marketing. The truth? Steal them.
Yes, you literally steal ideas and twist them a bit to make them fresh - make them yours.
That leads to another question, how do you make old ideas yours so that they’re fresh, new and - dare I say - revolutionary?
Actually, it’s not as tough as you may think. Here’s a quick and easy formula I use for turning old content into something new:
1. Find an old text. Dust off articles, books and home-study courses from your industry and find content that may be useful to your audience. I know what you’re thinking. “What about copyrights, Lisa?” Good question. Unless you plan to republish entire blocks of text from the source material, you won’t run into any problems. See the following points to find out why.
2. Pull out key points. Look at the information and pull out the salient points that really jump out to you. I usually highlight the points that are exciting to me, and then I re-phrase those points by putting them into my own words.
3. Add your expertise. Under the key points, you’ll want to share a bit of advice and expand on the main idea. The best way to do that is to share some of your experience. Tell an anecdote or story from when you handled a similar situation. For instance, when I was an editor at a large business-to-business newsletter publishing company, I often took several articles, pulled out the main ideas and combined the information to create one short, coherent article. You can do the same.
4. Raise your voice. To make sure you’re using the source material as a point of reference only, consider reading your final article aloud. If it doesn’t sound like something you’d say to a friend or colleague in the industry, re-write it. In my experience, that’s the only way the article will ring true with your readers. Plus, you’ll steer very clear of the copyright police - who, frankly, aren’t really watching anyway. It’s your audience you want to please.
Bottom line: If they’ve heard this information before, they haven’t heard it from YOU - a battle-tested, shooting straight-from-the-hip expert.
It really is that simple. But it does take some practice. Find two long articles from your industry and boil them down to four or five key points. Then simply expand on those points by sharing stories and anecdotes from your experiences.
Try it and let me know how you make out. This is the best way to find so-called “fresh ideas.” When you look at it this way, new ideas are everywhere.
About the Author
Lisa Sparks, a self-described article machine, is in the process of revealing t every trick, tip, idea, strategy and tactic she’s learned over her 16-year career as a journalist, editor and marketing geek. To get some of these tips at absolutely no cost, visit this Web site: http://www.ArticleSecretsRevealed.com