Article Genius

I just spent a couple hours going through my article tracking spreadsheet to check to see if there are any broken links and/or article sites that have nofollowed any of my bio links. I made a post a while back offering this technique as an article writing tip.

In the course of checking the sites I have submitted to over the years, I was able to locate several articles that were “dead in the water”.  I found that several of the article directories I had submitted articles to were no longer active. Normally this might bum someone out, but I was kinda excited about this discovery…You see I can now resubmit those articles to a new directory and get more use from the old content I wrote…In some cases these are several years old.

So why recycle an old article? Well in my case, some of the articles are gone…disappeared from the search engine indexes and thus I can safely resubmit them to new sites without duplicating my content.  Everything old is new again!

I really love the fact that I take the time to track my article submissions…this is essential to allow me to be able to go back and see if I can recycle an old article. Hey, it works and I don’t have to write new content.

I also wanted to share that I stumbled across several articles that I had submitted to sites that offered a good backlink (They didn’t use a nofollow attribute on my bio link) at the time. Now these sites have changed and have placed nofollow attributes, so my articles will not help build my page rank. I can now delete my articles from those sites and move them to a site that doesn’t use nofollow links.

Just a note on the nofollow stuff..it does appear natural to have nofollow links pointing to your site, so don’t go off on an anti-nofollow campaign and remove all of them. I tend to look at the traffic stats for the nofollowed articles and see if they are getting any page views. If I have a popular article that is getting some direct traffic, then the nofollow attributes doesn’t really hurt me that much. Like I said, it looks natural to have a wide variety of links pointed your way.

Using this technique, I am able to get more out of each and every article I write. Track your articles and recycle them when you can. Hope you find this tip helpful. Kerry

Most Webmasters and article writers dream of the day that they can obtain a great ranking in the search engines for their articles and content. Ranking on the coveted first page of Google™ is highly desired and can be a rewarding accomplishment…if you are not making this mistake!

You absolutely must realize that the keyword(s) you rank for must have a decent amount of search traffic before the #1 ranking is going to generate any traffic for you. I see this occur quite commonly as those new to the SEO world are trying to grasp the concept of ranking their content in the search engines.

Most beginners simply do not understand the following concepts needed to generate traffic:

1. There must be people actively searching for the keywords you are trying to rank. If no one is searching for the keyword then it does you no good to rank for it! Keyword research is absolutely necessary, you must know how many people are actively searching for a keyword or keyword phrase.
2. Keyword research should be done prior to developing your website or targeting a niche. SEO experts generally do not just build a web site and try to rank just any keyword…you need that search volume there to drive the traffic…or in other words, there must be traffic there to obtain once you get the ranking.
3. Most new SEO’s often make the mistake of assuming that in successfully ranking for a keyword that has no traffic, and thus very little if any competition,  they have somehow conquered the search engines. They tend to adopt their erroneousness practices and ultimately end up failing because they can’t understand why they aren’t achieving any results.

Perhaps the most damaging thing that I see occur is that once the person sees some of their content appear on the first page of Google™  the person often starts offering SEO advice or even paid optimization services to others. Even though the services may well be offered in good faith, the misconceived concepts will not result in profitable search engine traffic and can set both parties up for failure.

How do you avoid making this costly mistake? You must understand keyword research and how to look up the number of active searches for your targeted keywords. I highly recommend that you use the Google™ Keywords Tool to make sure that you are trying to optimize for keywords that can and will drive usable traffic to your sites. Always remember that even if a keyword ranks on the first page of Google, it can be worthless to you if no one is searching for that term. Write your articles and content around keywords that are actually searched for, optimize for them,  and enjoy the traffic!

Writing articles can be a very rewarding way to gain search engine rankings and traffic for your website/blog. Most people know this,however, how many of you go to the extra step of tracking your articles. If someone were to ask me where my original articles are at on the web, I can tell them.

For several years now, I have used the spreadsheet program in Google documents to list the specifics of my articles. While this may sound like a lot of extra work, I have found it to be a very handy way to help me optimize my efforts to gain rankings in the search engines.

I highly recommend that anyone implement a similar system, so as to allow them to keep track of their articles. My system is fairly easy to implement. My main objective us to keep a record of such things like the following:

• The Title of the article
• The website/article directory I submitted the article to.
• The URL of the published article.
• Whether the article is indexed in Google
• Submission date
• The anchor text used to promote my sites
• The website URL that I am promoting

These are the minimum that I would recommend that you track. You may wish to also track such things as if the article directory shares revenue with the writers, etc.

In keeping an accurate record of this information, this allows me to go through every month or so and check to see if my articles are still live and if they are still indexed in the search engines. This really helps me ensure that the content is evergreen and keeps helping me with my rankings.

It is not uncommon for me to find broken links and article directories and websites that no longer exist. If this does happen then I can usually reuse the article by merely resubmitting it, or even submitting it to another site, if I can see that the article is not indexed in the search engines. (Just a note: I never resubmit anything that is already indexed)

I’ll try to do a future blog post on just exactly how you can check to see if your article is still indexed and give you some pointers to help you determine the best course of action if you find a broken link or find that the article directory you submitted to no longer exists.

I’ve used this system for sometime now and it is very helpful. I highly recommend that you give it a try and please let me know what kind of results you see. Good luck with your writing.

Kerry Thomas

Google’s recent search algorithm change has really hammered some of the popular content hubs out there on the web. A good example of the effect of this algorithm change has been the recent announcement from Ezinearticles about their new quality guidelines.

Simply put, it’s going to be harder to get your article approved. This is because Ezinearticles is being forced to shift themselves away from being just another content hub. In the past, they have used a WordPress plugin to syndicate articles directly from your blog to their system. Now, they will no longer accept these types of submissions. There are other guidelines to meet now as well. Here’s their blog entry on Quality Matters

So what exactly is happening with Google’s new changes and why are they targeting content hubs? Honestly, I really believe that it all boils down to the types of syndication methods being used by these content sites.

Let’s examine Ezinearticles’ WordPress plugin. This plugin allowed you write a blog and then submit it to Ezinearticles in the format of an article…To be more accurate…your blog entry actually ended up posted on Ezinearticles as an article.  Now, we must ask; Where is the blog post? You may have guessed already that it is still published in your blog.

Was this system creating duplicate content? Certainly, in my opinion. This simply was not an ideal arrangement to syndicate content. It merely duplicates the content.

In my opinion, the whole concept of syndication is grossly misunderstood by article directories and content hubs in general. Let’s even add article writers to that list as well. We hear the word syndication all the time, but do we actually need to be syndicating the entire content…to the point of duplication? I say no way!

Here’s what I think article writers will need to do to stay within the good graces of Google and the other search engines. Why would I want to copy some content when I can easily create my own unique content to lead into a link back to the totally unique content I want to share. I just done this exact method above when I shared the link to the Ezinearticles blog above.

The important thing here is that I didn’t duplicate anything. Was it syndicated? Not to the point that it was copied! In fact, I managed to share the blog entry exactly the way Google and the other search engines are looking for. Would you agree?

Let’s all get out there and start sharing content correctly. If you want to share someone’s blog, website, etc. then by all means place a link to them. Write a small snippet of your own unique content to place the link in and keep everything relevant and I think you will find that Google still loves you.

Think I’ll coin a new phrase. How does Linkicate sound? Simply concept; link to content you want to share and all will be well. Let’s all learn to linkicate content!

I’d like to remind you that this is an interactive blog and I do allow relevant comments so I’d really love to hear some feedback from my readers. Thanks,

Kerry

Most article directories allow you to place a hyperlink to your websites, etc. in the author’s bio box. Writers should always make full use of this feature as it is the area where you can promote yourself and your products/services. With that concept in mind, do you optimize your bio area?

Let’s look at how you can be sure to get more exposure with your author’s bio area. The key here is to set the area to allow for syndication by a number of sources. Imagine that you have merely placed a hyperlink to your website here and then your article gets syndicated in a plain text newsletter. What happens to your link? It breaks!

The plain text version of your article is not going to show your link because HTML is not going to show. This can also happen if the article is printed directly for display.

How do you fix this and get your site exposed regardless of the syndication method? Look at my example below.

Example of an optimized Bio entry:

Kerry Thomas is an article writer. Find out more about Kerry Thomas here: http://article-genius.com/

OK, what just happened here? Simple, I did use some html to link my name as you can see, but I also placed the full url of my blog there as well. Now, if you can imagine that this post was syndicated in a plain text email newsletter, the links are going to break. This doesn’t concern me now because I have allowed for my URL to show to the reader even if the link does break.

Anyone reading the article can simply copy and paste the URL into their browser’s location bar and still find my article. If by chance the article was printed out my URL is also still visible and the reader can jot it down and use it to find me.

Everyone should optimize their author’s bio area to allow for maximum exposure, and you can see from this tip how easy it is to make sure your URL survives the syndication process.