Recently I read a great white paper by Jason Potash, of
ArticleAnnouncer, on just how to set up your articles and your website to maximize your traffic - and search engine rankings. (Jason has an automated piece of pretty powerful software that puts your article out on the Web for you.)
While I wouldn't want to give away all of Jason's proprietary information here, I found his thinking on how to really maximize your articles useful - and want to share just a few key nuggets here. And add my own two cents.
In the past, I've always just slowly and methodically submitted my articles, and let the SE "bots" do the rest to find and index them. I never even gave much care to using my keywords and phrases, or any of the old standard tricks. And boy was I misinformed.
Looking at the latest research on Google and the other SE's, it appears article publication needs to be handled in a very particular way. (Jason feels Yahoo and msn are rapidly catching up and maybe even surpassing Google's importance, by the way.)
Here's a new, better system:
1.
Write your article with full, out and out integrity. Don't try cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff from other sources. Don't try packing it with keywords so it's just a keyword-fest. Don't write schlock. Write good stuff for real people - not robots. Believe it or not, the SE's can tell now - which is amazing but true.
2. Potash says
vary your keyword density within your article. There's no "master formula" any more. So use all kinds of positions and repetitions for keywords that vary from piece to piece.
3.
Themes are important, according to Google - that means their technologies like Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) can pick a fake site packed with keyword-dense "content" from a real site set up by cool humans that are full of good stuff. Potash suggests publishing a series of articles on a theme. Cool idea.
4.
In your bio box, put the standard URL back to your site BUT also use a key phrase as an anchor text link - a key phrase that's got a hyperlink in it - as well. So the article essentially looks like this:
Suzanne Falter-Barns is an expert at helping anyone learn online branding strategies. Pick up her free list of top 50 national media contacts at www.getknownnow.com
5. Once you get this great article in place - with some keywords sprinkled throughout a few times, and possibly used in the header -
publish it on your site in an archive or library in its ezine-length version. (My articles all start in my ezines.)
6. Keep this in mind: you can
only add graphics to articles on your site - and use that spot to sneak in a few keywords in the title of the graphic, using an alt tag in the html code for the picture.
7. Then - once the article on your site is indexed in the big search engines -
add enough material to make it about 25-30% different. (To find out if it's indexed, just do a search for the title of the article in quotation marks.) Potash suggests adding a summary, or conclusion, modifying keywords. I suggest just adding more content in a place you can expand on, but didn't in the earlier, short version.
8. Then
post THAT longer version in article submission services like Jason's or www.submityourarticle.com BUT - and this is important - resist the temptation to slam out 8 articles in a week. Space them out to one, or at most, two per week. And build that database of your articles over time. Page rank can't be won in a matter of weeks, but a matter of months (when it comes to sites and articles. Blogs are different.)
So I hope you find these tips helpful. I'm personally grateful to experts like Jason Potash for doing the research and figuring out how all of this works. His software at
www.articleannouncer.com has some excellent power in getting your article out there to a gazillion sites. But almost more valuable is the information he shares with subscribers that really helps them power up his software, and use it correctly. Do check out his stuff. It's well done.
And do use your articles to slowly, thoughtfully get your name out there. Remember, slow and steady wins the race!
