Tuesday 20 July 2010

Build Killer Link Popularity with Syndicated Articles

By Scott Hawksworth

There are many schools of thought on how to build strong backlinks to a Web site. Some webmasters build reciprocal links, while others register their site in many directories. Still others do both of those, and rent links as well!

But one method used by a growing number of webmasters is that of building link popularity through the syndication of original articles. Syndicated articles are becoming increasingly popular because article syndication builds permanent links from many different, topically related, keyword rich pages. There are several steps one can take in order to ensure that an article is syndicated as much as possible, and that the links from those syndications are of the highest quality.

1) Write High Quality Articles

The amount of syndication an article receives is directly proportional to the demand for that type of article. Higher quality articles will prove more valuable to webmasters looking to reprint articles. Perfect spelling and grammar are requisite in order to ensure the widest syndication possible. Webmasters will be more inclined to reprint well-researched and well-written articles. Most articles are not of the highest quality, so a higher quality article will stand out significantly.

Articles should be more than simply a place to put a link in a resource box. The goal of article writing should be to make the article itself interesting. An interesting article can be syndicated on websites with high traffic and PageRank. Increasing article syndication will cause the link in the resource box to be copied by many Web sites.

In addition to building more links with higher quality articles, webmasters will find that quality content articles will result in an immediate traffic increase to a site. An article that is appealing to readers will naturally attract a large readership. The more readers an article has, the more likely those readers are to click on the link in the resource box.

2) Manually Submit to Related Sites

Another technique used by many webmasters to increase an article's syndication is to submit articles to related sites. The best syndications and links come from quality sites in a specific niche, not simply article banks. For example, there are many Web sites that will only accept business-related articles. Any webmaster of a business-related website looking to build link popularity should write an article concerning business and submit it to these sites. Potentially, other business sites could take note of a high quality business article and syndicate it on their sites (which are all related under the unique subject of business). Doing this will build topically related links which can improve a Web site's search engine rankings dramatically.

3) Write a Compelling Title

Articles have to be interesting in order to get the readers to scroll down to the resource box, or inspire webmasters to reprint the article on their Web site. The best way to draw a wide variety of readers is to have a compelling title. Catchy titles and sometimes even controversial titles can draw more readers. Coupling a compelling title with a high quality article is an excellent way to attract readers specifically looking for articles to syndicate.

Article topics should also be interesting. If a website is focused on a specific subject, an article about an interesting element of that subject will be syndicated more than a general article. For example, there may be hundreds of available articles about mortgage refinancing, but how many articles focus on ways financial advisors will try to manipulate someone seeking to refinance?

4) Stay Organized

Time should be taken when finding article sites to submit to. There are many Web sites that have large lists of article sites that accept submissions. A good technique is to submit articles to all of the article sites in a list and check later to see if those articles have been syndicated. Searching for the title of the article submitted in quotations on Google will show where exactly it has been reprinted. Backlink searches on MSN and Yahoo! can also be helpful. Building a solid list of verified article sites can help maximize article syndication and also time efficiency.

Some article sites only accept submissions via e-mail. Some SEOs shy away from e-mailing articles because it is more time consuming and often involves the creation of a biography and picture submission. E-mail submission article sites however are often more inclined to only reprint articles of high quality, and thus these types of sites' articles are often widely syndicated.

5) Write a Killer Resource Box

The heart and soul of a syndicated article is its resource box. The anchor text and link destination of the links in the articles should be varied. Varying anchor text will help avoid penalties in search engine rankings and create higher-value links. Often changing the resource box after submitting to each site proves beneficial. An article about dogs with the anchor text "dogs" should be varied with anchor text like "puppies" for the other article submissions. Using technology such as latent semantic analysis, search engines will notice "dog" and "puppy" as related words, but will not penalize the site for having unnatural links (e.g., if all of the links used "dog" as anchor text). This same effect can be achieved by varying the link target. Linking the first half of the article submissions to page A, and the second half to page B will avoid penalties from search engines like Google. Articles are a proven way to get links, but if a new site suddenly acquires 100 links to the same place in a short time, search engines might penalize it.

Monday 19 July 2010

Blogs and RSS Boost Your Online Business, Rankings, Traffic and Sales.

By Richard Weberg

Blogs for Advertising?

Yes! Blogs and RSS boost your online business, rankings, traffic and sales. We all sometimes ignore the trends in advertising on the internet until the masses are allready doing it. That is why I felt compelled to right this article and hopefully help others to understand that Blogs are a very powerful advertising method and you do not want to ignore this trend, You will regret it!


A blog is a frequent, online publication of comments, web links and news. It is an online Enzine of sorts. People maintained blogs long before the term was coined, but the trend gained momentum with automated published systems, most notably is blogger.com. Thousands of people use services such as Blogger alone.


I only realized myself how powerful Blog advertising was, after I submitted an article to one Blog, yes just one Blog. What happened next amazed me! Within one week my new site wich I used in my byline in the Blog was not only indexed, but every single page was indexed and I had over 200 other sites pointing links to my site! All from one Blog posting. See websites need content and Blogs are a great source for content, and search engines LOVE blogs! I really need to say that again, search engines love Blogs!
Want your site indexed? Want hundreds maybe even thousands of incoming links all pointing to your site?


Here are the reasons you should not ignore Blog advertising. Remember when all search engines were free, and simply submitting your web sites got you listed quickly? Gone. Then it wa FFA pages, they brought in a ton of free traffic, built links to your site, and added to your mailing list like crazy. Tried one lately? Safelists were an online goldmine for a while... until bottom less email accounts were introduced.


Every new technology does what you need, at first. Then slowly more and more learn the secrets, and by the time the herd has caught on it's too late. Technologies have changed, everything has slowed way down, or the search engines have decided that it's become another form of spamming the search engines and stop weighing it so heavily. Sometimes they even ban the technology from their databases, remember doorway pages and multiple sites?


So where is blogging along this curve today? The early adopters have been doing it for the last couple of years, and the leading internet marketers started coming into it over the last year, many are still just getting started with it. So you're at the perfect time, most of the expensive development time is done, the bulk of the bugs are out of the whole RSS and Atom feed systems, and engines like Yahoo, MSN and Google are embracing the technology and waiting to greet your Blog with open arms. So dont ignore this whole Blogging idea, embrace it you just might see your sales soar through the roof!

Sunday 18 July 2010

Blogging, Spamming and Blog Spam

By Trina L.C. Schiller

There is a right way and a wrong way to do things...
By Trina L.C. Schiller

Email marketing once proved to be immensely effective, but the greedy and idiotic polluted the well by spamming the planet with everything from weight-loss products to sexual enhancement drugs and beyond. Because of the stench, filters and laws have been created to attempt to fix the problem, but still the Internet is polluted with more and more junk each day. So obviously, filters and legislation are not the solution, for consumers, publishers, or marketers.

Everyone has been left scratching their heads and asking... What do I do to avoid this crap and make the Internet mine again? How do I build my business and promote it without having to deal with email? After all, what's the point in spending money on email advertising campaigns when there is no guarantee that the emails will even reach their destination?

Enter... RSS.
RSS is the perfect communication tool. It's applications far outreach those of email for marketing, publishing and personal communications. RSS is the answer to our communication woes.

Using RSS to create blogs for communicating with customers, affiliates, partners and family is far and away more effective and reliable than email ever was. As a marketing tool, it really packs a punch that email never could. The reason being is that blogs are targets for search engine spiders. They are themselves, a web presence, whereas email never was and never will be.

Just like a web page, search engine spiders hit blog pages and rank them. The difference between the static web page and the RSS feed is that web pages seldom update their content, RSS feeds, by design, are created to be dynamic and provide regularly updated content, in theory, depending on the blog owner of course. This prompts the search engine spiders to revisit and rerank them more often.

For writers, publishers and and anyone else with something to say, RSS has been a godsend. It has provided the answer to the question of what to do now. Blogging has replaced email for those who have become frustrated with dealing with the problems of email publishing and marketing. Publishers can now get their message out to their subscribers without the headaches associated with sending email, or posting static pages to the web. Even publishing an ezine to the Internet as a web page required the sending of email to make readers aware of the newest issue.

As with anything, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and blog publishing is no exception. Now that RSS has become the rage for marketing purposes, several people have taken it upon themselves, in the name of the almighty dollar, to pollute this well too. The newest rash of 'RSS tools' have created some issues of ethics and and credibility. With perhaps the honest intention of being search engine optimization tools, or an automated system for fetching content, this batch of stuff has too much potential for misuse. The result of misuse of these types of programs can be devastating. Already some of these programs have been banned from places like Google and Blogharbour because of this potential.

Programs such as these in the hands of the inexperienced, will cause future problems for bloggers down the road. More and more pages generated using these programs will be banned, and getting banned, right out of the gate, for a newbie, would be a sad thing indeed.

The right way to use blogging to increase your search engine presence is to publish good content. Period. Provide useful information to those who are looking for it. Become someone's trusted information provider, and you have a customer for life. Publish keyword rich articles that give the searcher what they are looking for... solutions for problems.

Publish your information regularly. Weekly is good, daily is better. Sending pings and things too often will get you blacklisted too.

And here is where networking comes in... Find content for your blog from article banks, where authors submit their work for reprint. List yourself in databases as one who accepts article submissions. Get to know other authors and publishers and share content with them. Syndicate your blogs in exchange with other bloggers. Watch your world explode with new opportunities.

Automation in business is a good thing, but it has its place. Nothing beats human communication when dealing with people and creating partnerships. Do you want to talk to an autoresponder? No, and I doubt anyone else does either.

Some of the new programs designed for the automation of article collection have legal issues to consider. The biggest being copyright infringement. Not every author wants their work reprinted, or they require control over where their work is displayed. (Which is as it should be.) Without manually seeking your content, you could very well find yourself being served papers for publishing someone else's work without permission.

Plagiarism is another issue. If you don't follow certain rules for reprinting contributory work, you stand to be hounded for plagiarism. Yet another sticky issue.

Some of the new programs mock safelists, or resemble FFA sites. Before long, those types of blog pages will become banned as well. Search engines will figure out a way to block non-informational blog pages, those that carry nothing but links or classifieds. (Is your head sore from hitting that brick wall yet?)

Still, there are other programs designed to post spam to blogs using the comments feature. This is referred to as comment spam. The only solution thus far, to battle comment spam, is to disallow your readers the option of leaving comments. This is a bad thing, because allowing your readers to interact with you is supposed to be one of the benefits of using this form of communication.

The makers of these programs may have had good intentions to start with, but have ultimately created Frankenstein's Monster. Many are stating that their programs are not spam, because they do not involve email. That is a cop out if I ever heard one. Spam is the transmission of unwanted stuff, whether it is sent to your inbox, or your blog, or even the search engines themselves. Search engines want relevant content, not pages of of keywords, or links. So feeding them page after page of nonsense is spam.

Everyone hates spam, except the spammers, so why be a part of something loathed by so many and embraced by a few? Bad business if you ask me.

The only real way to combat these issues is to simply not use the programs themselves. Do your due diligence and create a reputation as a trusted information provider, not a blog bomber, and your business will prosper. Using these programs will ultimately diminish your reputation and your livelihood.

Your customers are looking for information, a solution to a problem. Give that to them, not just endless pages of links. You will achieve your rightful spot in the ranks, and you stand a far better chance for longevity. There are good RSS tools available, you just need to look beneath the sales copy to find them. And if you are new to RSS and blogging, do some research. Find someone who knows, really knows what RSS is and how to use it, and ask some questions. Don't go out and spend buckets of money on something you're not sure how to use, because you could be doing yourself more harm than good.