Publishing Articles
Site owners write articles and publish them on the web for different reasons. It might be to enhance their professional reputations, publicize their business, direct traffic to their website or to improve their rankings in the search engines. There are three basic strategies for publishing articles and they are article directories, selective publishing and onsite publishing.
Article Directories.
The least effective but most popular method is to write an article and then submit it to various article directories. Submission can be done either by hand, automated software or through an article distribution service. These methods differ only in the scope of submission and for all practical purposes the results will be very similar and not very good. Article directories simply host articles and they cannot ensure that the article will be used in the way the writer would like, intact and with a hyperlinked byline for example. The fact is that most articles submitted this way end up on very poor quality sites even if the article itself is exceptionally good.
Typically directory article submitters observe a rapid increase in references to their article in the search engines immediately after submission, followed by a slow decline as duplicate content is removed from the indexes.
Let’s look at the history of a specific article as an example. The article is called ‘The Worst Internet Marketing Strategy Ever?’ and can be seen here. The linked to page (at the bottom of the article) can be seen here.
The reason we are looking at this specific article is because there is a history for the search term |”the worst internet marketing strategy ever”| in this promotional video.
The video is 12 minutes long but in essence we are shown the increasing number of pages found containing the search term, after the article’s placement in article directories. The hits in Google go from 51 on March 18th 2005 to 3,920 on June 15th 2005.
If we search now (24th January 2006) this has shrunk to 506. The vast majority of these are from garbage sites simply displaying the title of the article and little else, like this for example.
The important question here though is what contribution the article has made, in terms of inbound links and ranking, to the referenced page.
Well, Google shows only 2 links and no snippet is shown for the second link.
However we know that Google shows only a representative sample of the links that it actually knows about and avoids showing duplicates, so let’s look in Yahoo for inbound links to get a better idea:
Yahoo shows 64 inbound links. If we examine these links we find one of them is a JavaScript redirect, 9 no longer exist, and of the 54 remaining 43 have a Toolbar PageRank of zero. The highest Toolbar PageRank is 3 for only two of the inbound links. In general the quality of inbound links is poor with many of the linking pages appearing on made for AdSense (MFA) and scraper sites (sites that have no original content but use a bot to crawl sites such as article directories and plagiarize their content). Please see the addendum added later at the end of the post.
So it is not very surprising that if we search for |ultimate internet marketing strategy|, a phrase occurring in both the title and the meta description of the referenced page, it is not in the top 1,000 of the Google SERPs. Neither is it in the top 1,000 for the same search in Yahoo.
It might be suggested, because the page has an orphaned frame (see the Frames post in the Tutorial section) and also as there is no body text, that the page will not be indexed for that search phrase anyway. However this is not the case and if you search for the exact text with |”ultimate internet marketing strategy”| it appears in position two of the Google SERPs.
So the page we have just analyzed is performing badly as far as the search engines are concerned but this is not surprising given the quality of the inbound links. Submitting to article directories is a waste of time unless you have a particular craving for cheesy inbound links. You may get lucky and have your article published in its entirety by a reputable source but this is the exception rather than the rule and there are much more effective ways to use your time and a well written article to advantage.
Selective Publishing.
Submitting your article to selected sites can be extremely effective. Look for high quality sites connected with your sector and call or email the site owner. Ask if they would be willing to publish an article on your chosen topic and offer to send them a sample. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have any articles on their site already just point out the advantages.
Some imagination is required to find the right sites and make an initial approach. For example if you have written a high quality article on antique jewelry you may have identified about.com and this page as an ideal location for your work. Notice here that you can call or email the page editor but don’t ask straight away for your article to be published. Spend a little time building up a relationship first so that they can recognize that you do indeed know what you are talking about and are worth publishing. A few sites like this that will publish your articles individually are worth a thousand articles in article directories.
Onsite Publishing.
Publishing articles on your own site is an essential component of emarketing and combined with selective publishing (above) is the most powerful strategy (not the same articles though!). Developing a high quality resource center on your site by publishing articles once a week is ideal. Once the section has substantial content (which in itself is good for the search engines and your site) you can do a media and public relations operation to publicize the fact that you are an expert in your field. Remember your site will gain more attention the more noise you make within your industry, to customers/clients, the public and the media.
If you know your stuff but are not confident enough to write your own articles employ a professional. Elance has some excellent content writers but make sure you choose one with consistently good feedback.
Now you have no excuse! Get to it!
Addendum:
Quite rightly a reader has suggested that the use of Toolbar PageRank (TPR) may be suspect in the context it is used. I agree and I used it only to emphasize the poor quality of the page(s). In practice a TPR of zero is actually quite difficult to achieve for a page that has existed for six months or more, unless the site itself is inferior.
Another reader has suggested that an inference made on the basis of one example is not good science! I agree but there are a million examples like this. Look at the first testimonial on [03/24/06 link changed to archive copy because the original page is no longer there - what a surprise!] EzineAnnouncer thenewslettersource.com TPR of zero, the first testimonial on Article Submitter Pro home-business-reports.com TPR of zero, the first testimonial on Article Marketer kitgokarts.com TPR of zero and so on ad nauseam. Of course there may well be sites that have improved their ranking only from article directories but I doubt it. If you find one let me know!