Caydel’s SEO Blog

This is a the final chapter of the How To Promote Yourself Through Article Marketing series. Please also see Part I and Part II!

Market That Article!

Now that your article is written, you have to market it. There are typically two ways to do this – either by manual submission, or by using a distribution service.

Submitting manually is the process of visiting the various article sites and directories on the Internet, and individually submitting your articles for inclusion.

Distribution services are exactly what they sound like. You can hire a company or individual to submit your articles for you to a set number of directories. Sometimes the articles are submitted by hand, other times the service will use a script to automatically submit the article to hundreds of sites.

Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Submitting manually may take a large amount of time and effort. But it will allow you to customize your article’s formatting and display for each site you submit it too, ensuring that it is presented to the best of it’s ability. Submissions services are quick and easy, but may involve a fee. if you employ a submission service, you will lose the ability to ensure that your articles are displayed properly on every site. Below is a few of the siteswhich offer for article submission.

Article Directories:

• Free-Journal-Articles.com *recommended*
• ArticleOnramp.com
• EzineArticles.com
• GoArticles.com

Article Distribution Services:

• ArticleSender.com *recommended*
• ArticleProbe.com
• ThePhantomWriters.com

Please note that I have not used any of the distribution services listed apart from ArticleSender.com, although I do have articles in the four directories listed above. These lists are not comprehensive - you can find dozens more simply by using Google or searching on the various webmaster forums.

In Conclusion…

Article Marketing has the potential to be one of the most valuable tools you have for promotion of yourself or your website. With everything, what you get out of it will be a reflection of the effort you put into it. If you make a point of ensuring that the article is top quality, and it distribute it well, you will find that it can drive valuable traffic to your site, leading to greater profits, and promotion of your brand. Take it seriously!

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This is the second part of the How To Promote Yourself Through Article Marketing series. Please also see Part I and Part III!

Write Your Articles

The most important part of Article Marketing is the articles. If an article doesn’t catch potential readers immediately and entice them to continue reading, none of the readers will feel compelled to visit your site.

Now, the scope of this post does not include lessons or tutorials on how to write an article. If you would like to know more about that, read Copyblogger. Still, I would like to make a few relevant points to help you maximize your success.

Write Something Unique

Do you want people to remember you? Than write something they haven’t read before. Take a new angle to a controversial issue, or discuss something that hasn’t been discussed before. You need to offer your potential readers something they can’t get anywhere else. You need to provide a reason for them to remember you, and this can be done successfully with unique views, opinions and content.

Headlines Are Your Best Friend!

On an article directory, your article will be mixed in with hundred or thousands of others, with only your headline to differentiate yourself from the rest. Write something that will grab the reader’s attention and steer them towards yours!

Make sure to include some keywords in your title for search purposes – a potential reader searching for a specific subject will be more likely to click on your article if they see exactly what they want in the title.

Headings Are Your Second Best…

Many writers do not use headings and subheadings in their articles. This is a mistake. Readers will often scan an article, and read the headings as a ‘Table of Contents’. It makes sense – what better way to get a feel for the contents of the article?

By breaking up your article into sections, you are providing some structure to it, and making it more comprehendable for the reader. Be careful – too many headings may be just as overwhelming as a large block of small text.

Make Your Author Bio Box Compelling!

Most article sites have an author bio box which you can use to write a bit about yourself, and perhaps include a link to your site. Think carefully about what you want to include in this. Of the following two examples, which is more compelling?

“Brian Vuyk is a blogger who writes about SEO stuff at http://www.caydel.com”

or

“Get the most from your websites! Learn how to promote yourself by reading Brian’s blog at http://www.caydel.com”

Obviously, the second is far more compelling. It contains a call to action, and should grab the reader’s interest. Seriously – would you really click on the first?

Look the Part in Your Author’s Photo

Another thing to consider is a photo. Many article sites will publish a photo of the author along with the article. It is a proven fact that people will remember and recognize the photos long before they will recognize the name. The photo draws people’s eyes, and creates an impression on them. I have often read an article, and recognized the author without recognizing the name or the site. I simply recognized the photo.

Take your photo seriously. Consider the image you are trying to present of yourself in the article you are writing, and the site you are linking to. For instance, a high-powered stock trader writing articles on stock tips will want to present a different photo of himself than the outdoorsman writing about techniques in bowhunting.

Link Back to Yourself Cautiously

In addition to linking to yourself in the Author Bio box, try to link back to your website once or twice within the body of the article. Be careful with this! Make sure that it fits within the flow of the article, and ensure that it is relevant to the specific context of the paragraph you include the link in. If the link sticks out too much, or points to an irrelevant page, you may risk rejection by some of the sites you submit it to. Use anchor text that fits into the sentence you are writing, but try to include some keywords for SEO purposes!

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This is a the first chapter of the How To Promote Yourself Through Article Marketing series. Please also see Part II and Part III!

Introduction

As a webmaster or marketer, you need to use every tool at your disposal to drive visitors and traffic to your website. Without visitors, you have no chance at branding or revenue, like a store with no customers.

One tool often overlooked by many webmasters is Article Marketing. Article Marketing is the process of writing an engaging, informative article, submitting it to article directories on the Internet, and collecting traffic and backlinks through it.

What Can it Do for Me?

Article Marketing has three major benefits:

It is very beneficial from a SEO perspective. When performed properly, it will create a large amount of backlinks on the Internet, with anchor text you control. The links will be on pages relevant to your site’s content. Without getting off-topic here, we know that the more relevant backlinks your site has, the higher it can rank within the major search engines.

From a traffic perspective, you could get hundreds of visitors to your website via the articles you write. These visitors will be interested in your site and subject, and will be receptive to your message and/or products. This will result in increased revenue and sales.

From a branding perspective, Article Marketing can help you increase your mind share. When people think of a subject within your niche, or planning to purchase an item you sell, you want them to think of you first.

If your article is well written, and appeals to readers, you may find it republished on hundreds of websites across the Internet, resulting in an increase of traffic and links. It is not uncommon for a well written article to be republished hundreds or thousands of times on different websites!

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Things are changing here in the last few days.

New Forums

The first major thing I want you all to notice is the ‘Forums’ link at the top of your screen. In there I currently have two forums, one titled ‘SEO Chat’, and another called ‘SEO Help’

The first forum, ‘SEO Chat‘, is just for regular chat, whatever you wanna talk about as an SEO. You know, issues, fun, kicking back, whatever.

The second forum, ‘SEO Help‘, is intended for readers to post sites they want SEO help with. However much you know about SEO or web design, feel free to post your site in a new thread in this forum, and I, or perhaps another reader, will be able to give you some suggestions

New Feature

This brings me to something else I want to announce. I plan to run a new feature here on the blog where once a week or so, I will pull a site out of the SEO Help forum, and will post a review of it on the blog. I will take a quick look over most of the major SEO factors, and make whatever recommendations I feel necessary to help your site out.

Now, while I am pulling the sites I review out of the forum semi-randomly, there are a few things you can do to make them easier for me to review.

First of all, give me some background when you post your site. It helps me a lot to know why you started this site, and what your goals are for it. Tell me what you have done so fat in terms of Search Optimization. With a bit more knowledge about your background and goals, I will be able to make far better recommendations which will be of a lot greater help to you and your site.

Here’s where I really need your help! I have not chosen a name for this feature yet, and would welcome any recommendations. Feel free to make suggestions in the comments. If I use the name you suggest, I will link to your blog or website on the first edition of the feature.

Cool Links

And here are the promised cool links!

FingleFangle.com is a new SEO blog search engine based on the Google Coop which indexes a variety of the top SEO blogs. I’ve found it fairly helpful to quickly find what ‘The Pros’ have to say about certain subjects without all the interference and noise of the ‘lesser’ blogs.

If you have a sense of humour, check out the ‘Top 10 Signs You Need A New Website‘, the latest post written by Pat of The Matterhorn Marketing Minute. Funny stuff - I’ve encountered many sites with many of those hallmarks…

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Last weekend, when I moved my blog to this new domain, after moving the files from their old location at http://www.infohatter.com/blog/ to their present location, I needed to set up a redirect to ensure that traffic following links pointing to the old location would still end up at the right posts.

Additionally, I knew that I wanted to use a 301 Redirect, since that is commonly held to be more Search Engine Friendly than a 302 Redirect. For those wondering why, a 301 redirect indicates to the visitor or bot that the page has moved permanently to it’s new location, as opposed to a 302 redirect, which indicates that the move is only temporary.

Now, I had never set up a redirect before, so the first thing I did was to Google it. I found a bunch of sites teaching about how to do redirects, but they all made either one or both of the following assumptions:

• I had access to the server httpd.conf
• I only wanted to redirect a single page

I am on shared hosting, thus do not have access to Apache’s httpd.conf. Instead I knew that I had to perform the move in my sites .htaccess file.

Since I wanted to move an entire site rather than a single page, using the instructons given for rewriting a single URL to point to a new location would have become extremely tedious given that I had nearly 500 active URLs at the new location.

Eventually, frustrated by the lack of instruction on the web, I finally turned to #apache on irc.freenode.net, where some helpful people got me finally set up.

How to 301 Redirect an Entire Site in .htacess

If you wish to have all the URL’s in an existing site redirect to your new site, include the following code in the .htaccess file in the root of the old site.

Redirect 301 <oldpath> <new URL>

So, in my case, I added the following line to the .htaccess file in the root of infohatter.com

Redirect 301 /blog http://www.caydel.com

Now, any URL which points to my old blog location is now forwarded to it’s corresponding URL in the new blog. For example, http://www.infohatter.com/blog/monetize-your-blog-3-selecting-your-advertising-strategy/ now redirects all the visitors to http://www.caydel.com/monetize-your-blog-3-selecting-your-advertising-strategy/

301 Redirect for a Single URL in .htaccess

If you have a specific set of pages you would like to move, while leaving the others intact, you can use the following 301 redirect in your .htaccces. Notice that the syntax is the same as we used above to send a whole subdirectory to a new url. This form will also keep any arguments passed along with the URL as a GET or POST request, so that they are available to the redirected page.

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

301 Redirect to your www

I feel somewhat obligated to include this, since this is perhaps the most important redirect in existence, and EVERY SITE SHOULD USE IT.

Many webmasters do not realize that they likely have their entire site duplicated. Google considers www.example.com to be a different site than example.com. The ‘www’ is considered tp be a seperate subdomain,

This presents a problem because if you have links pointing to both versions, Google will split the attributed trust from these links between the two copies of your site. This will result in lower search engine rankings, and lower search traffic to your site. Now this can be eliminated by implementing this simple 301 redirect in your .htaccess.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Good Luck - remember that you always want to use a 301 redirect instead of a 302. Always make sure you 301 redirect your ‘non-www’ version of your website to the ‘www’ version for the best Google results.

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I just want to take a second and pass along one of the coolest linkbait ideas I’ve seen in a long time. Erik Vossman of BlogtownPress contacted me today to inform me of a contest they were running to promote the launch of the BlogtownPress blogging network.

Erik pointed me to the ‘Link to a Coconut’ contest. Here’s the deal: Erik has picked 3 random posts from the blogs in the BlogtownPress network. To enter, you may post links to any posts within the network, up to a maximum of 3 links per post of your own. When the contest finishes, Eric will pick a random trackback from each of the three BlogtownPress network posts to win.

The prizes for the contest are what make the contest unique - each winner recieves a coconut straight from Hawaii, where the BlogtownPress headquarters are located. The coconut will be shipped to the winners free of charge. Additionally, the winners will each recieve a link on Erik’s Blog.

This is a piece of unique linkbait - each entry in the contest will net 3 links to the network. This will build up a large number of links to the new blogs in relatively short order. Of course, the only way to make something like this really succeed is if the prizes are unique, and somewhat valuable. The link is not the motivation here - it’s all about the coconut. Who wouldn’t want their own custom coconut shipped to them from Hawaii?

Well, I guess I will play along on this one - I want that coconut. So, my three picks are:

1. Announcing Blogtown Press from Erik Vossman’s personal blog
2. 3 Kinds of Successful Bloggers from Blogging on Empty
3. An Inconvenient Truth from Fueling the World

So there you go - check out the contest yourself!

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So I was thinking about Akismet yesterday - I wonder if it could be abused to silence other people.

Lets think about this a bit - what do we know about Akismet? From everything I have read at the Akismet Website, we know that it weighs a variety of factors in the incoming message to determine whether it is spam or not. Note that this is not blacklist activity; rather the recognition sounds like it is run through a neural net of some sort for heuristic analysis. What factors would they be? Most likely they would include the user name, email address, as well as words and links in the subject and body of the comment.

So, how can this be abused?

Let’s say there is somebody you want to silence on the internet. The first thing you would need is his/her login credentials, such as their typical user name and the email address used. This can easily be retrieved by enticing a user to comment on your own blog.

Now that we have his name, and the email address used to post comments. Consider this scenario:

Lets say we were to start posting comments to other blogs using his credentials. Let’s link to a bunch of prescription drug sites, porn sites, and adultfriendfinder while we’re at it. After posting a certain number of comments like this, would Akismet begin auto-filtering this username and email address as spam?

What if we were to somehow spoof his IP address - what then? Would this be the final nail in his coffin? And how long would you need to keep it up for the identity to get to the point where it is automatically associated with spam? How many legitimate comments would need to be marked ‘not spam’ before this person gets his identity back on the whitelist? If this is a possibility, it presents huge possibilities for abuse.

I would like to hear something from the Akismet team over this - this seems a little too simple, yet I have not seen any evidence that indicates that this is not possible. How about it? Can this be done? Or are the check in place at Akismet good enough to ensure that this won’t happen?

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