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
Don’t Jump With Joy, I am not going to blog here about the factors to be taken into account to make your website appear in the first page of Google. I’d say that it is impossible to list and explain all the factors under a single post because there are 100+ factors to be taken into account. So this weekend I planned to start a dedicated blog just for explaining the factors for getting a website in the first page of Google search results. I cal the blog “Daily Google Tips” which will publish the first tip (post) on April 1st 2010. If will post one tip for getting in the first page of Google everyday. All the factors will be covered over time. So those who want to make it all the way to the top – wait eagerly till April 1st .. The expert advice is on its way.
So what will you suggest someone who needs a fresh start with social media promotion? I planned a social media promotion strategy that included some of the basic but essential services.
Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter Promotion
What is social media promotion without linkedin, facebook and twitter promotion. And you guessed it – My first recommended service was business network development in Linkedin, Facebook and twitter. I have included creation of accounts in these 3 popular social networks (Ofcource with 100% profile completion which is indispensable for maximum visibility in the search engines). After profile creation, I have guaranteed the client to maintain these accounts with some set parameters for one month.
Maintenance For On Month Included
Facebook :
* Creation of public FanPage for the client’s business
* Adding new friends to the network
* 5 Postings (content) in the public fanpage
* 15 Photos+5 Videos added to the fanpage
* Weekly updates posted to the wall
Linkedin :
* 100% profile completion*
* 15 QnA questions answered in Linkedin
* Creation of a company profile and addition of 10 employees*
* Establishing 15 Connections and 2 recommendations from other members of Linkedin
* Membership in 5 Groups and initiation of 5 Discussions
Twitter :
* Customized twitter account
* Interlinked to Facebook and Linkedin
* Twitter directory submission to get 100+ Natural followers
* Achieve 100 Natural followers goal
Now I am sure that this one month maintenance will make these profiles popular enough and self replicate.
Creation of Customized profiles in top 25 social media blogs
I don’t have to explain more about this. Everyone out there knows blogs are indispensable for social media promotion
Squidoo Lens And Hubpages Hub
Well I added setting up this for the client as well. I promised him to deliver a well written unique hub and lens for free along with profile setup.
So that’s it. I think this is what a startup social media promotion needs. Anything else I missed for a small budget starup?
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.
- Using the paypal services tab
- Processing the order through paypal checkout in the website
- Sending money to the ‘Request Money’ queries
Charity funds cannot be processed through paypal and obviously there is no purpose code for charity funds. However, online merchants can have a great sigh of relief as paypal has succeeded in working out this issue with paypal
Note: This is no offense on a particular client, but we want all online marketers understand some real facts.
As we provide unmatched SEO services, our customer retention rate is above 96% . We are working hard in finding the issues from our side to make this rate cross 98% by this year end. So our team started working on finding our flaws this year. As a part of this clean up, the emails of the client’s which we lost (stating that our service was not satisfactory) were forwarded to me so that I can come with a solution for them. I sorted these emails category wise so that it will be easier to find common errors that our guys have made. It didn’t take much time as there where only a few emails. I decided to start with the E-commerce website promotion campaign emails as that is one of our huge markets. The first email was regarding the in-effectiveness of our e-commerce SEO campaign.
The client has an Online store that sells various products which fall under a same category. As the client knew at least something about SEO, he ordered the E-commerce SEO service at first, just for one particular product section of the e-commerce store (not promoting the site all together). The SEO campaign was done for 3 months and within this period; he got huge sales and great traffic to that particular section. The client was happy and obviously he ordered the same package for another product section of the e-commerce store. The client was not happy this time as he had no sales for this product section as he had for the other one.
I had the analytics access to this ecommerce store. Checking the e-commerce analytics, I was able to see that the overall traffic to this website has increased to about 24 % over the past month. I also ran a check for keyword positioning and amazing, the site appears in first page of Google for the particular keyword (Keyword not revealed due to client privacy). I was also able to see that the paid traffic (adwords etc) has gone down by 25%. It means that our e-commerce website promotion campaign has boosted the traffic of the site by 50%. What is understood here is that surfers visit this e-commerce store but they find something wrong with the product or the store.
Upon checking other e-commerce stores selling the same products, the mystery unfolded. This client was selling the new product for very high rates when compared to the others. Moreover, his products page had nothing other than the product images and prices (no description, testimonials or customer remarks). Obviously none will be interested in buying these products from him priced higher than the market rates with nothing to support the high pricing.
I passed these findings to him and now he understood why there was no sales (the product page which he promoted first was well detailed and there where many research reports and all which supported the high pricing). Now he told that he will add the specialties of his products explaining which it is highly priced.
Remember that we can send customers to e-commerce stores. It is their free will to make a purchase from you. We don’t mess with people’s free will. So here are a few points to do before choosing an e-commerce promotion campaign:
- Very high price tags can drive customers away forever (There are many choices available today so customers are not restricted to buy things from the E-commerce stores that appear in the first page of Google Results)
- Add enough description about the products so that the visitors of your store can understand what the product exactly is.
- If your product is so special and hence the high pricing, detail the specialty to the visitors by displaying it in the sales page.
If you don’t do these atleast, you won’t get any sales no mater how you promote the e-commerce store.
Alright I thought I can clear up these mails by Today and go to office fresh tomorrow with a clear solution to increase customer retention. Unfortunately, now I understand that our customer retention will increase only if all our clients understand the real facts about SEO. As already said, it is there FREE WILL and we can’t mess with that.
Into Another great weekend!!!
