Showing posts with label article submission. Show all posts
Showing posts with label article submission. Show all posts
Entry of Penguin Update and impact on article marketing
SEO strategies had steadied a bit in 2012 as the Panda updates kept on refreshing but with only minimal changes. All of a sudden, Matt Cutts hinted about “Over optimization”, which lead the entire web promotion sector into a panic. SEO experts who were using article marketing strategy extensively were very much worried as if their websites were sure to be hit by the penguin update. Thanks to the clarification from Google. During the penguin update, it was mentioned by Matt Cutts, (head of Google Webspam team) that “If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.”
That being said, article marketing still works if you syndicate carefully instead of spamming the web with poor quality content. Here are some most important changes that you need to make with you article marketing strategy after the penguin update:
1. Forget about “article submission” just think in the lines of “article syndication”: Gone are the days when you write an article and spread the same article with the links intact to all the article directories. Instead, the original article should be published in any ONE of the currently best article directory or blogs. You should be getting the article published and then spread the same article to the other article directories just by including the original article source in the resource box. Doing so will make the process as syndication rather than just submission
2. Goodbye to keyword anchor texts – The penguin update has redefined the way how anchor texts are used. Earlier, we use the “money keywords” aka “exact match keywords” to link back to your website. Right now, after the penguin update, forget about the keywords. Use branded keywords or natural keywords such as “visit website” or “click here” to link back.
Just these 2 changes would change a lot on the effectiveness of article marketing. The bottom line is article marketing still works if the process includes a syndication done in the right way.
About Author:
This information about article marketing is contributed by ArticleSeen article directory which is one of the best places to distribute content after the penguin update. Submit articles to articleseen and spread the word like a wildefire
I still remember the first email that I opened on February 4th 2010. It seemed to be a challenging one. For the moment of truth, I will become quiet skeptical whenever I see a message that points to a problem in EzineArticles.com. Alright, now coming back to the email, the client has used our “Article Writing & Submission Service” before a week and now when he was about to order the next set of submissions, he noticed that all 3 articles submitted to ezinearticles.com were rejected. Now he won’t place the order till these old articles go live. Well, as the article was written by us it was our responsibility to get them live.
First Contact With Ezinearticles.com
I was pretty sure that the article was good (I wrote them after hours of research with optimum keyword density and following all the ezinearticles.com guidelines.). While logging into this client’s account at ezinearticles.com, the problem was not mentioned clearly but the articles were rejected (for no reason!!). One thing I hate with ezinearticles.com is that they won’t provide with the exact rejection reason of the article in most cases (Unless the article has grammatical or spelling errors). They always want the authors to contact them to know the reason. I contacted the support immediately to know the reason.
Next Contact Next Week
I got the response for my contact from ezine after a week. According to them, the same articles were available in some other place attributed to a different name Charles Thomas (Name changed due to privacy issues). When I checked it, it was true. The same article was in docstoc under a different name (But was submitted by ourselves) with links pointing to the site as same in the rejected article at ezinearticles.com. I wonder why ezinearticles.com cares about the author name as long as it is linked to the same website. However, as the client needs approve article in ezine, I explained all these to the Ezinarticles.com team.
Yeah You Guessed it! Next Contact Next Week
I had to wait another week to get a response. Even after explaining all these, Ezinearticles.com team wants me to attribute these articles to the same name Charles Thomas or else they WILL NOT approve it. I was suggested to all Charles Thomas as a pen name and resubmit the article. Unfortunately Charles Thomas was already taken a pen name by someone else and ezinearticles has an option to contact them and make a special request. I clicked on the contact us link which landed up in an error page. So I contacted ezine team again and admitted that I am clueless on what to do.
Quicker response in 5 days
Now they want me to add a middle name to Charles Thomas and resubmit the article and they assured me to make the articles live if I do so. I added Charles XX Thomas and resubmitted the articles. As usual I have to wait till the articles are reviewed by ezineaarticles.com team.
You Get 2 !
After 3 days 2 articles got approved and the remaining one article was again rejected stating the article was attributed to someone else and this time they provided a url where the found it. To my surprise it was the client’s website itself. I can’t explain this to ezine again which may take another month to get resolved.
Unfortunately I lost this client. But I learned some valuable lessons.
Ezinearticles.com is the best directory and obviously you need to submit all articles first to ezinearticles.com and get approved before you submit it anywhere else.
In case of submitting an already published article, make sure to submit it under the same author name as in the original source.
It is always better to have a single author name to your article wherever it is distributed (This increases the authenticity of the article as well).
Though I lost one prospective client, I learned a great lesson of article submission through the whole month of February.
“I write well written articles which are informative and interesting to read and yes of-course a little promotional sentences. I write all these articles after days of hard work on researching on the topic and gathering information. After all these I have asked you guys to submit this article and I can see only 2 out of 100 directories have published the articles. You have made my efforts a total WASTE OF TIME!!”
The Answer / Story
So as you can see, this client is irritated because he thinks that there was a problem with the submission process. So I made a spot check with the article that was submitted to ezinearticles.com and my guess was right. The article was rejected by ezinearticles.com because of the use of promotional pitch in the last paragraph of the article. So now it is clear that the problem was with the article and not the submission.
I explained this to the client and he understand WHO wasted the time now.
Moral Of The Story:
Before you start writing the article be sure to the read the editorial guidelines of ezinearticles.com. You will be well aware of the fact that an article that gets published in ezinearticles.com obviously meets the requirements of all the article directories out there. So read the guidelines atleast once before you start writing articles for the purpose of article marketing and follow it or else the strategy will be a complete waste of time.
One of my best clients (name not revealed) rang the phone this morning. Basically he wanted to know whether the telephone line existed. Well I picked the phone and he made a huge sigh of relief. He was satisfied to find atleast one SEO company in India with an active telephone line with a real human answering them. This client himself is a search engine optimization expert. But somehow, the SEO service providers have confused him with plethora of strategies. He is now clueless on what SEO strategy is really the best. And I started explaining him:
1. Is your website rich with fresh and informative content? (This question is the most important one because without fresh content in the site, there is no point in spending thousands of dollars in Off-page SEO)
2. Does your site carry appropriate META tags, titles and descriptions? (Though I am not an expert in On-page SEO I pretended to know at least something)
3. What kind of off-page SEO techniques have you applied to your website so far?
4. How is the result for the off-page SEO?
The client’s words:
His website is of ecommerce type and there is no much content in them as the site just carries products. He has done enough On-page SEO and lots of effective Off-page SEO tasks as well (according to him). I was surprised to hear what he called as effective Off-page SEO (most of them can’t be revealed in public). He has never tried article submission or press release distribution. Some guy who calls himself an expert in SEO has misinformed him that article submission has lost its charm. After spending several dollars for several months on the SEO strategies that he suggested, this client has lost faith in his words.
My SEO Advice
I told him straight away that you cannot spell SEO without article submission and Press Release distribution. In fact, the inexperience of the SEO guy who this client hired is proven by his words that “Article Submission has LOST Its Charm”. Well at this point the Client demanded a proof to support my statement that article submission STILL HAS ITS GLORY. Man I don’t talk without solid proof. I and my colleague have spent several days researching on article marketing and recorded our findings. We forged our findings into a Whitepaper. I pointed this client towards the WhitePaper on Article Marketing. I let this client read the entire “article marketing research result” right away so that I can get some break time to have a cup of fresh Indian Coffee. By the time I finished my coffee, the Client has realized the Importance of article marketing in SEO (with this solid proof, none can ignore the fact).
I later suggested him that, though his site presents only products, he can get product descriptions written and tagged to each product. As this will be fresh content, search engines will love them. As he had native writer under his wings, he said that he will be adding descriptions for all products over the few days.
In a business point of view I failed to get this client make an order for Product Description Writing. However, it was a pleasant chat for me and I was happy to have another person out there to understand the importance of Article Marketing.
