A Good Time is Blog Time

So now it is official, Google are looking for good quality content on the sites they return in their search results and are going to war against the domains that provide low quality, rubbish content. So is anybody panicking or are you like me thinking, hasn’t that always been the case? Because if it wasn’t it should have been. OK it is a given that they didn’t necessarily have their algorithm sorted out well enough to detect the junk before, there is plenty of evidence of that in all those gobbledygook re-spun articles you come across so often. But if they really do have their algorithm sorted now, then really for the people that produce genuine well written articles with good content, this change can only be good news.

There is one possible downside and that is if they start to consider duplicate content across multiple domains as representing low quality, because from my interpretation this is not at all the same thing and previously Google would not have considered that a problem either. They may have filtered the results to return the same article only once perhaps, but that is fair enough, nobody searching the Internet wants the same article 15 times just because it comes from a different domain. It is after all still the same article and what the searcher really wants is a selection of different results, that match their enquiry, from which to choose. Or at least that’s what I want and of course I would like them to be good quality.

So this is how I approach article marketing, I always mix up my articles and post on all the big Internet sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and Ezine Articles et al. I tend to put complete original stuff on Squidoo and Hubpages then link to them from my own blogs and websites i.e. I promote them as though they were on my own sites. But then I add feed articles to the likes of Ezine, Xomba etc. etc to get links back to my sites.

Read the rest of this entry »

Link building is a significant activity for any web site owner, because it brings two benefits that can mean the difference between success and failure of the site. One is a better search engine rating and the other is targeted traffic.

In the link-building scenario, backlinks are considered essential because each time someone clicks a link to your website, the various search engines view it as a positive indication that you have valued content and will ultimately award you a high page rank. So with respect to search engine optimization techniques, the main focus has to be on building as many backlinks as possible. The more oneway links, the better your positioning on the search engine results page. When the major search engines rank you highly, your targeted viewers will discover you more quickly, which in turn, for you, will mean higher conversion rates from customer to customer.

How To Go About Link Building

Read the rest of this entry »

Choosing an article marketing service is a mostly hit-or-miss affair, unfortunately, this is because there is no way to evaluate their worth prior to signing on and paying your dues for a few months, depending on the competitiveness of the keyword you’re trying to win. No article marketing service will reveal its network of websites because that would set up its network for failure. Not only will competitors know about how it works, but search engines like Google will blacklist its sites, refusing to index them for trying to game the system.

So without being able to see the equipment, so to speak, how could you decide which article marketing service is right for your business? There is only really one way, by biting the proverbial bullet, of course. It’s as simple, and as unfortunate, as that.

All you do is sign up for a few months and see what happens. There is nothing to mull over on your part, nothing to analyse, as if picking stocks or following corporate earnings reports. Unfortunate, because all you can do is wait and see what happens – then repeat with each article marketing service until you find the one right for you. Or your money runs out, whichever comes first.

Read the rest of this entry »

Online article marketing services abound, but they all work on a single common principle, using a network of websites to host content that contain backlinks promoting clients’ businesses. Choosing the right service can be a hit-or-miss affair, however, in that no online article marketing company will divulge its network of carefully cultivated websites. For one thing, no one wants their competitors to know which sites are theirs, but the most important reason is that search engines like Google are sure to penalize the sites for gaming the system.

The penalties can range from an outright ban of indefinite length (in the form of complete de-indexing) to significantly lowering the sites’ ranking, neither of which an online article marketing firm can afford to receive. But without a list of sites comprising their networks, there is no way to objectively evaluate how likely these companies might work for you. The only way to get even an inkling of whether such promotional services would work is to bite the proverbial bullet and pay up for a few months’ membership.

It takes a few months to properly evaluate an online marketing service because results are often not immediate, even in the best-case scenarios. Search engines like Google use time as a factor in determining relevancy, for an established site is generally more trustworthy than something that was put up just the other night. Thus, the backlinks found in an article that is hosted by a brand-new site is usually assigned less “weight” by the search engines than those in an article that’s found on an established site. Think the New York Times versus your personal blog: the same exact article may appear on both, but who do you think Google is going to rank higher – much, much higher?

Read the rest of this entry »

Article marketing automation may be an idea whose time has finally come. It takes all the grunt work out of marketing your articles yourself, saving you valuable time – time that could be spent attending to the other aspects of your business, or even your life, such as friends and family. But how does article marketing work? How could something that requires human thought be automated?

Well, it’s automated from the end-user’s point of view. Article marketing automation simply means that someone else does all the heavy lifting for you, so to speak – the content creation and article submission and distribution. More and more companies are starting to offer this kind of a service now, comprehensive in its scope and turn-key simple in its vision.

The most sophisticated kinds, like Article Content Engine or ACE (articlecontentengine.com), writes the articles, then submits and distributes them for you. There is nothing for you to do except specify the keywords to be won and the domains to promoted. It saves a lot of time and money – for less than the price of an article submission service alone, you get articles that are written specifically to target your keywords and promote your business, as well as the automated submission that ensures you never see a rejection e-mail telling you to resubmit your article after editing it.

Read the rest of this entry »