When it comes to the various whitehat link building strategies, link building with articles is by far the most effective for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, as has been stated numerous times, content is King on the Internet and articles still provide the most effective way of distributing content. Many other new media types have become popular, but none will ever eclipse the simplicity and flexibility of the written word. Besides the fact that link building with articles adds content, it allows for some very targeted off-page SEO techniques that can generate both impressive numbers and quality of incoming links.
Before covering the intimate details of link building with articles, it is important that you understand the power behind article marketing in general. Here is an analogy that is very relevant in the offline media world. Let’s say you’re at the supermarket and while picking up dinner you pass the magazine aisle. You weren’t intending on buying a magazine, but the latest Aviation magazine on the rack really grabbed the sport pilot in you and got your attention. You pick it up and scan through it and come across a great article that stimulates your interest, so you throw it in the shopping cart. Later that evening, you read the article and then end up reading the entire magazine from front to back. In the process, the author of the article makes mention of some GPS avionics equipment and you go online to take a look at his recommendation.
Now, all of this started as a casual browsing experience, and at each successive step you developed more and more trust with the author because that article spoke or connected with you in some way. Now, in your mind, that article is an “expert” and his “expert” recommendation carries weight with you and you are far more likely to buy that GPS now than had you not read the article. Internet article marketing works the same way. It is the bate that brings people to your site, where, if the connect with your site and its product offering, they are likely to become a customer. One article draws them in with expectations of seeing more quality content. If your site delivers on that expectation you will find that your user may read several other articles on your site or blog. All of this behavioral analysis, by the way, can be readily observed through detailed analysis of your website logs and/or usage of Google Analytics. While this particular usage of article marketing would be more appropriate for traffic and sales generation, it is important that you understand the basics of article marketing before you look at the advanced link building with articles strategies covered below.
When link building with articles, there are three main methods of exploiting articles for SEO purposes and they are not necessarily complementary. One approach is to generate massive numbers of incoming links through submission to hundreds or even thousands of web directories. Now, as has been discussed in SEO tactics, volume of links is one factor in increasing your site’s Page Rank, but quality of links is also very important as is the relevancy of those incoming links. The second approach involves distributing articles to very high authority sites which rank very highly in Google’s eyes. This is often a very manual process and is, therefore, quite time consuming; however, the quality of the links obtained through this method far surpassed the first. So, like many things in business, the two methods are a tradeoff. You may seek to find your own balance between the two approaches. Some people completely ignore the mass submission approach altogether and just focus on high quality submissions. That is a viable approach as well, but you will be getting much smaller numbers of links. Perhaps a better approach would be to take your articles and split them up and send 50% out for massive link building and the other 50% to high quality article directories. The third approach is to use those articles to build content on your own website, however this is not truly a link building process but rather a content creation use of articles.
There are many whitehat and blackhat methods for articles submission and article submission services, so you must thoroughly investigate how and what these services do so that you do not risk your site being banned due to some abusive blackhat submission strategy that your less than forthright article submission service employed. One term that you will likely here over and over again describing the process of generating multiple unique versions of an article is “spinning”. Spinning an article is a technique that takes one original article and converts it into dozens or even hundreds of unique articles. Again, there are very good and reputable solutions for article spinning that, when done properly via manual article writing processes, are extremely effective and still whitehat. There are, however, many more solutions out there that appeal to the crowd of people that want something for nothing and these blackhat completely automated spinning solutions will likely create such a plethora of junk content that Google and the other search engines will ignore it, or worse, if they submit to distrusted services and article directories, they may even get your site de-indexed or banned.
Link building with articles is a very effective SEO strategy for your business and has many different benefits beyond simple creation of backlinks. There are dozens if not hundreds of article writing and submission services out there on the Internet – be prudent and do your due diligence in investigating their approach to article marketing. If you are not confident in your own SEO knowledge to properly evaluate their approach and/or services, seek the counsel of someone who is – do not jeopardize your money site to save a few bucks on a cheap “sounds too good to be true” solution as you will likely pay dearly for it in the end.
