What Article Marketing Is – and Isn't

An SEO professional is worth the money you pay because we know what we are doing. I spent two hours this morning walking a prospective client through the intricacies of article marketing – she didn’t understand why she didn’t need a unique article for every single article marketing site out there. (Of course, she couldn’t afforda unique article for every site, but that was beside the point.)

You see, there are two different forms of article marketing. The first is when you are just trying to build links back to your main website, usually to the home page and one inner page. The normal way to get this accomplished is to write a decent SEO article that hits the same keywords as the page you are linking to, and send it out to a hundred directories and then write a new one and send it out to another hundred. You hit a major directory with some clout, and a bunch of the smaller ones. About half the directories will accept your submission, and most directions let you place 2 links in the resource box, so you end up with about 100 good links per article. The links boost your website and get your main page and inner pages ranked better in search engine results.

The other type of article marketing is designed to do two completely different things – to position yourself as an expert and to drive traffic back to your website.  In these cases, every article must be unique, extremely well written, and placed on just one of the top article directories. Even though the Panda Update penalized ‘content farms’, you can still rank your individual work if you focus on the long tail and produce really valuable content. You don’t want to submit the same article to more than one site, because now you run into duplicate content issues (which are NOT a concern when you are just posting articles for links). You see, when Google sees the same article spammed out all over the place, they are less likely to show it in search engine results.

Understanding when the duplicate content penalty does and does not apply is very important. Basically, if you are article marketing for links, don’t worry about it,. if you are article marketing for traffic and reputation, then you need to sit up and take notice. When article marketing for links, the quality of your articles does not have to be top notch, but if you are marketing for your profile and traffic, you want to ensure that your content is focused and readable. A good SEO copywriter can supply you with both kinds of copy to ensure the best results at the best price.