How to get on the front page of Google (Part 5)

Monday, 19 April 2010 17:15

Getting articles published in the media might be easier than you think and generates some (potentially) powerful back links - critical for good search engine rankings.

Article marketing for SEO vs traffic generation

Submitting articles for publication is a popular strategy for getting back-links, but it takes a different strategy to one that is designed to generate visits to your site (ie traffic).

Good, valuable content is what an article must be all about if it's going to get published.  You can produce the first version of an article then refine it or re-purpose it slightly depending on the article and who you are targetting and submitting it to. 

You can submit an article to a sites like Ezinearticles.com which is one of the biggest article marketing sites, or directly to a subject oriented or news site.  Some directory sites like NZS.com also publish articles.

Big site, big SEO reward?

Some publications, especially those that have grown out of traditional media (ie newspapers) are cutting costs by reducing their pool of journalists.  They are looking for quality articles to use on their websites.  Some 'experts' that appear time and time again might not be any better than the next guy, but they write well and have the confidence to approach these media outlets.    A short article on a big, site that get lots of vistors can get you more 'link juice' than dozens or even hundreds of back links from small, irrelevant sites.

However there is a gotcha, and it's to do with something called 'nofollow' tags.  For example, Sean D'Souza frequently has articles in the NZHerald.  But the links back to his psychotactics.com website has a nofollow tag.  This instructs the search engines not to use the link to influence the link target's search ranking.  It means not 'link juice' is passed on.  This is designed to prevent search engine spam.  This doesn't matter if you are doing it for brand recognition or traffic, but pointless for SEO. 

So before you get excited about a site publishing your article, check if backlinks have nofollow tags.