You hear it all the time – one of the best ways to build your web site’s content, get more links, and increase its PageRank is to write and distribute good articles. In addition, getting your name out there as an author of substantive, quality writing is a sure way of establishing yourself as an expert in your profession, another way to bring traffic to your site as visitors flock to hear the great guru first hand. But after distributing a number of articles, many of them to some of the better-known free article directories I have discovered that this might not be the best distribution method, despite claims to the contrary. Here’s why:
First, although these directories contain many, good quality articles, they are also populated with some really lousy stuff. I recently told a fellow writer friend who was concerned about having her stuff side-by-side trash that in many cases people don’t know good writing from bad. And second, most people using these directories search for a specific topic and don’t even see the reams of good and bad stuff.
Second, it appears that many sites that pick up free articles do not have the highest PageRank around, and therefore, will not be viewed as highly valuable links. In fact, sites with low PageRank linking to your site can be a detriment. Could it be that sites that rely upon free content are not as quality-oriented as those that generate original content?
Now that we have debunked the concept of sending your articles to article directories to get more exposure and build links, what is a viable plan for article distribution? You’re not going to like this answer, but like so much in SEO, we believe the best approach is to go out there and find reputable, quality sites and ezines and use much the same approach as you would to acquire good links. Find out who the webmaster, editor, etc. is, and send him or her a personalized, well-thought out email as to why your article would fit well with and benefit their site, ezine, or newsletter. Then include the article, pasted into the email, and wait for a response. If you haven’t heard in say, two weeks, send another, nicely-written reminder email.
Can you send the same article out to multiple sources? As a seasoned magazine feature writer, multiple submissions of the same article were the quintessential no-no unless you made it abundantly clear in your cover letter that you were doing so. The same holds true here, but with a caveat. Don’t send the same article to competing sites, ezines, and newsletters. Do some creative analysis to find other venues that will be interested in the topic from another viewpoint, and perhaps even modify it a bit to fit their audiences more precisely.
So think carefully about your article strategy, and instead of numbers of links, think quality of links, just like the search engines do when crawling your website.
No, we’re not being facetious. One of the most important things you can do to increase your site’s standing with search engines is to build its number of incoming links. The more links you have, the higher your site’s Link Popularity.
It used to be that content was THE factor that determined the quality and ranking of web sites in the search engines. But in the last two years, the number of websites has exploded. So the search engines needed another way to sort the good from the bad and calculate a site’s ranking.
Enter Link Popularity.
The number of links that point to your site, and the quality of those links, are what we mean by Link Popularity. In fact, experts in SEO say that increasing your number of relevant incoming links is the most important strategy in your SEO process.
The logic of it, from the search engine viewpoint is that the more credible, relevant, content-rich sites that point to your site, the more important your site is perceived to be. Therefore, the higher its ranking should be. The search engines view these links as “votes.” So you can see why it becomes essential to have a significant number of top-quality sites linking to your site.
But there’s a hitch here, and that hitch is that in order to maximize Link Popularity, the links also need to be from what the search engines consider sites that are in some way related to yours.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say your site is the basis for your business, which is selling gift baskets for special occasions, and you have a choice of two incoming links. One is from a web site that sells bicycles; the other is from a web site that talks about the history of gift giving in America. Which site do you think would carry more weight? That’s right, the history of gift-giving site. It would carry more weight for two reasons. First, it is directly related to your gift basket site, and second, it contains good, solid content.
Speaking of history, the concept for Link Popularity originated about two years ago with Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page who devised an algorithm that they dubbed PageRank in honor of Larry. Where previously they had focused more on “on-page” factors to determine a site’s ranking, they came to realize that “off-page” factors were even more important, especially incoming links. The formula they created counts, and then ranks links based on a score of 1 to 10 for importance. Thus, the more “important” the link, the higher the value of its “vote” in this now very democratic process of determining PageRank.
Do you want to check the links coming into your web site? Go to Google, and type in:
Link:www.yourdomain.com
All of the sites that come up on the listing are your incoming links. You can go to each site and evaluate it for quality as a first step in making a game plan for how to acquire more quality links.
Ranking Factors Up Close
Let’s look at these Google factors more closely:
Number of links:
As you can now see, more is not necessarily the merrier! Not that a lot of links is a bad thing. The key is having a lot of high-ranking links as opposed to just a huge number of links. In fact, having many low ranking site links could actually hurt your overall ranking.
Link quality:
A link from a site like Yahoo is a coup, and obviously considered to be a 10 on the link rank scale. Avoid sites that do not have a large number of credible sites linking to them.
And whatever you do, don’t ever get links from link farms. Google can easily recognize these links and discounts them in its calculations.
Link text:
The actual text in the links to your site is important. If possible, include the search terms for that page in the link text.
But It’s Not Just About Ranking
Here’s the beauty of link building. In addition to being a solid strategy for increasing your site’s ranking with the search engines, it is also a vehicle for getting more traffic without the search engines!! How? As we just saw, the idea is to find high quality sites that represent a service or product that is relevant to yours.
Here’s another example:
Let’s say you have a site for writers. In your search for relevant sites, you come across a high-ranking site for fine pens, so you ask for, and get, a link from their site to yours. Now just think, all those fine pen aficionados can find their way to your site with a simple click on the link and you have a whole new potential customer base.
Why Are Links So Important?
Here’s the reason: the visibility and ranking of your site is affected by the following:
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The way your web site is linked to other web sites
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The way other web sites link to your web site
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The web your web site pages link to each other
And as we have seen, for those sites linking to yours, the most value is placed on those sites that have relevance to yours in terms of theme, products, and services. The idea here is that visitors from these similar sites are more likely to be seriously interested, potential buyers than the random visitor, or visitor from unrelated web site.
Next let’s look at the basic steps involved in optimizing links for your site.
Overview of Link Optimization Process
Here it is in a nutshell:
- List your site with search engines and directories
- Build valuable content on your web site that will attract other sites to link to you.
- Search for relevant, highly ranked sites to which you can link.
- Search for relevant, highly ranked sites that you want to link to you.
The secret to success with this process is to engage in it as an ongoing one. Once you’re listed with the search engines and directories, you’re listed, unless you do something for which they decide to remove you. But keep building your content and searching for strong, relevant, successful web sites both to link to and from which to request a link.
The Bottom Line
With a good solid linking strategy resulting in many high-quality links to your web site, you can’t go wrong in boosting your site’s ranking. But that’s not to forget about the importance of your page’s content and design because if you have nothing to offer prospective sites, chances are you won’t get your targeted links.
So just remember, it’s a two-way street – good content yields appeal, which in turn paves the way for you when you request links from credible, relevant sites.