Caydel’s SEO Blog

This is a the first chapter of the How To Promote Yourself Through Article Marketing series. Please also see Part II and Part III!

Introduction

As a webmaster or marketer, you need to use every tool at your disposal to drive visitors and traffic to your website. Without visitors, you have no chance at branding or revenue, like a store with no customers.

One tool often overlooked by many webmasters is Article Marketing. Article Marketing is the process of writing an engaging, informative article, submitting it to article directories on the Internet, and collecting traffic and backlinks through it.

What Can it Do for Me?

Article Marketing has three major benefits:

It is very beneficial from a SEO perspective. When performed properly, it will create a large amount of backlinks on the Internet, with anchor text you control. The links will be on pages relevant to your site’s content. Without getting off-topic here, we know that the more relevant backlinks your site has, the higher it can rank within the major search engines.

From a traffic perspective, you could get hundreds of visitors to your website via the articles you write. These visitors will be interested in your site and subject, and will be receptive to your message and/or products. This will result in increased revenue and sales.

From a branding perspective, Article Marketing can help you increase your mind share. When people think of a subject within your niche, or planning to purchase an item you sell, you want them to think of you first.

If your article is well written, and appeals to readers, you may find it republished on hundreds of websites across the Internet, resulting in an increase of traffic and links. It is not uncommon for a well written article to be republished hundreds or thousands of times on different websites!

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I just want to take a second and pass along one of the coolest linkbait ideas I’ve seen in a long time. Erik Vossman of BlogtownPress contacted me today to inform me of a contest they were running to promote the launch of the BlogtownPress blogging network.

Erik pointed me to the ‘Link to a Coconut’ contest. Here’s the deal: Erik has picked 3 random posts from the blogs in the BlogtownPress network. To enter, you may post links to any posts within the network, up to a maximum of 3 links per post of your own. When the contest finishes, Eric will pick a random trackback from each of the three BlogtownPress network posts to win.

The prizes for the contest are what make the contest unique - each winner recieves a coconut straight from Hawaii, where the BlogtownPress headquarters are located. The coconut will be shipped to the winners free of charge. Additionally, the winners will each recieve a link on Erik’s Blog.

This is a piece of unique linkbait - each entry in the contest will net 3 links to the network. This will build up a large number of links to the new blogs in relatively short order. Of course, the only way to make something like this really succeed is if the prizes are unique, and somewhat valuable. The link is not the motivation here - it’s all about the coconut. Who wouldn’t want their own custom coconut shipped to them from Hawaii?

Well, I guess I will play along on this one - I want that coconut. So, my three picks are:

1. Announcing Blogtown Press from Erik Vossman’s personal blog
2. 3 Kinds of Successful Bloggers from Blogging on Empty
3. An Inconvenient Truth from Fueling the World

So there you go - check out the contest yourself!

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As I wrote earlier, I have been re-included back into Technorati, which is great. I am getting lots of traffic from them, and a few comments and links I otherwise wouldn’t have. I’ve also noticed another major surprise - autoblogs are now grabbing my posts from Technorati tag RSS feeds, which may lead to duplicate content and link devaluation problems.

The Good

Well, I may as well start on a positive note. By picking up my posts from Technorati, these auto blogs (linked examples) are giving me a bunch of backlinks I otherwise wouldn’t have had. Additionally, I have been getting the odd bit of traffic from these blogs, although people coming from these blogs don’t always seem to stick around. There are some up sides to the fact that I am getting syndicated all over creation.

The Bad

Of course, it is a bit of a downside that many of the auto-blogs are syndicating my content without any attribution of authorship, or anything to note that these are not original. This annoys me - I don’t care if people quote me to high heaven in their posts. Or, even quote the post whole-sale. But most real people have the courtesy to attribute what they borrowed from me. These auto blogs don’t even do that.

The Ugly

And wait, it gets worse. I am wondering to a certain degree how this will interact with the Google duplicate content filter. From what I know of the dupe filter, Google assumes that the first place they crawl containing a certain chunk of textual content is the proper owner. In these days of RSS feeds, and tag-searching, I have found copies of my posts on these auto blogs within 30 seconds of my posting them to my own blog. What would happen if they get crawled on one of these autoblogs first, prior to my blog being crawled? Would Google attribute to them the authorship, and leave me in the cold?

Conclusion
I am sure Google is smart enough to recognize spam blogs quite effectively, but I wouldn’t doubt that there is still some level of risk inherent in the process. Additionally, if we think about the situation in terms of link building, overall incoming link quality plays a large role in how much Google trusts your site*. Obviously, if you had a site referenced by 10 .edu sites out of 12 incoming inks total, you would probably be trusted more by Google than if yo had 10 .edu links out of 2,000 links total. The value of your incoming .edu backlinks is now more diluted by the vast mass of your link weight, and you have a lower average quality of your incoming links.

So, I am not sure what to think about this auto-blog copying issue. I would assume that everyone associated with Technorati has the same problems, whether they recognize them or not. Thoughts, anyone?

* Yes, I know. It’s a debatable subject in whether incoming link quality plays a role in whether Google trusts you. I personally think it does, so I am sticking with this viewpoint. Hate mail into the comment form, please!

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Text Links Ads, one of the premiere companies in the link-sales industry has now launched a new Link Baiting service. In short, they offer two plans, one at the $5000 level, and one which will cost you $10,000. With both plans, they create a link bait item, submit it to the major social media sites, and mail them to appropriate bloggers. The $10,000 plan also gives you additional creative ideas in addition to the idea for the link bait, they submit to a wider range of social media sites, email twice as many bloggers, and, if possible, submit your site to CSS galleries.

Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagens are two of the top names in the Link-Building field, and the price of this service reflects that. Would a service like this be worth the high cost? This is cheap in comparison to some of the other link baiting services available, but I can hardly believe that this is worth $10,000. Let’s be honest, the major time is spent in coming up with the idea. If you are somewhat skilled at crafting your own headlines and summaries, you could do the submissions yourself, in addition to emailing relevant bloggers.

So, is the idea worth $10,000 to you? I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has purchased a link baiting service in the past. Tell me how well it worked! I want to know hat type of ROI you think you received from this service! 

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I just read an interesting post by Andy Hagens called ‘Four Trusted Links You Can Build Today‘. I have a few comments on the article I thought I would share (lucky you!)

In his post, Andy writes,

“A lesser-known Wikipedia page: Do you have an investment-related site? Do not try to add your homepage link to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock. Instead, add the deep link to your “The Forward P/E Ratio Explained” page from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PE_ratio… it’ll have a much better chance of still being there tomorrow.”

Now, I have some good and some bad things to say about this.

The Bad: First of all, any one who spams their link to Wikipedia merely for the sake of the link should be stoned. And I don’t mean in the nice, familiar Western way. I mean with rocks. Really, really large rocks.

The Good: That said, this can be a really effective link building method, if your sites contain quality content. Again, if you are merely spamming links, see above.

When I originally started looking at this method some time ago, I came across some interesting realizations - many of the ‘deeper’ subjects are not covered. Just this evening for instance, I was trying to find ways to build Wikipedia links to a site of mine, when I realized that a number of subjects and topics I covered in the site DID NOT HAVE EXISTING WIKIPEDIA PAGES.

So, I did whatever any web designer would do in that situation - I created the pages. I wrote some good, high quality content for the Wikipedia articles. Obviously, they were subjects I was already interested in, since I had created web pages and complete sites around some of these subjects.

So, in essence, I have a bunch of Wikipedia articles which now contain my page among very few others.

Regardless of how you get your links into Wikipedia, there are a few methods to ‘pimp’ out your Wikipedia links so that they pass on the most linkjuice possible.

1. Interlink the pages - In short, search Wikipedia for all instances and mentions of the subject on which the article containing the links to your page, and link them to the page in question. This, to some extent, raises the profile of the article on the Wikipedia domain. It is a well known fact that Google includes internal links as well as external links when determining how important pages are to a site.
2. Maintain the pages - As with any web page, the more regular the updates, the more often the pages get spidered. Staleness of a page may be a major factor in Google’s algorithm, although there is some debate on the fact. At any rate, by making constant contributions to the article, and constantly improving the quality of the page, you will gain a site rep, and your changes are less likely to be immediately reverted.

Another site I noticed that is an easy mark for a good, albeit nofollowed link is AboutUs.org. This new site is gaining popularity recently, and I have begun noticing it linked to from the Domaintools.com tools. It is actually really interesting - it immediately will grab a site thumbnail, an excerpt, and isolates contact information, maps it with Google Maps, performs a bunch of other interesting feats, all in a great MediaWiki format. For a good example, check out the AboutUs.org page for Oilman’s blog.

Let me know what you think!

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Today, for my employer, I am creating a list of top SEO resources for him top refer to after I leave here permanently tomorrow. Here is what I have so far, if anyone has any recommendations or comments on the list, I would really appreciate them! I want to keep the list somewhat compact though - If I hand him a list of 20,000 different links, I can guarantee none would be read…

SEO / Keyword Analysis Links

Overture Tools -Overture is a search engine which used to power yahoo for a while. Generally gets 20% or less of the traffic that Google would get, so vary your stats accordingly.

1. http://inventory.overture.com/ - The Overture Inventory gives the search volume in the last month for the keywords you specified, along with the search volume of related keywords.

2. http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/ - The Overture Bidtool shows the highest bids currently placed upon a certain term within the Overture Search Marketing system, which is very similar in style to Google Adwords. Generally the prices reflected here are 60%-70% of what equivelent keywords would be bid on through the Google Adwords system.

WordTracker – Wordtracker is a paid service to analyze keywords, and links, to find the keywords and phrases that would be the most efficient to target through the use of their ‘Keyword Efficiency Index’.

3. http://wordtracker.com/

DigitalPoint Tools – There are more in the right-hand Nav bar under ‘Webmaster Tools’

4. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ - This tool will check against the Wordtracker and Overture engines to find search volume for given keywords, in addition to suggesting other terms

5. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/ - This tool will track rankings and backlinks for a given website or page… Register and check it out – it is very useful.

Other Tools

5. http://chkdom.com/ - As the title states, ‘A Quick Tool to Check a Domain’. This will check indexed pages, backlinks and saturation on the big three engines.

6. – The Yahoo SiteExplorer shows the indexed pages and backlinks in the Yahoo Engine. Yahoo shows *all* their backlink data, sorted by link weight. IE, your best backlinks are at the top.

7. http://www.seomoz.org/tools/kwtool.php – The SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool allows you to run tests and reports on keywords, to determine the difficulty of ranking for certain keywords. While you are at SEOmoz, make sure to read the articles at: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php and http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php

SEO Websites – These websites show the latest in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing news…

1. Search Engine Roundtable: http://www.seroundtable.com/ - Search Engine Roundtable reports on the most active threads in the SEO/SEM forums.

2. Search Engine Watch Blog - http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/ - More Cutting Edge Search Engin News

3. Threadwatch - http://www.threadwatch.org/ - Important - this is a daily read….

4. SEOmoz Blog - http://www.seomoz.org/blog.php – SEOmoz is great SEO company from the states. Their blog alsways has interesting SEO tips and tidbits…

5. SEOBook Blog - http://www.seobook.com/blog.php – This blog is written by one of the top minds in the SEO industry. Although I’ve never read it, his book is considered to be one of the best in the industry.

Recommended Webmaster Forums – In addition to the below, watch for forums referenced in the Search Engine Roudtable pages – they will generally be very good sources for information.

1. DigitalPoint Forums - http://forums.digitalpoint.com – All webmaster talk, all the time. Lots to learn about here

2. eWealth Forums - http://www.ewealth.com – More affiliate marketing related, great if you want to monetize website traffic

Misc. Resources - Public outcry has prompted me to add these as well:

1. 
   
   
2. Webmaster Radio - http://www.webmasterradio.fm - the source for constant webmaster/SEO broadcast shows, with an awesome chat room….

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A recent post by Stundbl today got me pointed towards CrazyEgg.com. CrazyEgg.com provides a service by which you can track how many visitors, and clicks you get to your site, as well as the location of the clicks and more - a really cool service. If you want a better idea of what they do, or to see that stats they can and will produce, check out their demo.

The tracking is really easy to set up; merely place a single line of javascript onto the page you wish to track. The only complaint I have is that their free version is somewhat limited; of course, that *is* the nature of business. As it is, the free version still hold a lot of promise for helping you to optimize your content based on information concerning user behaviour on your site.
According to the latest post on the CrazyEgg blog, the initial problems they were experiencing after the launch have somewhat cleared up, and they are stabilizing. I would recommend signing up, and seeing what they can do for your site!

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