Posting articles - increase google ranking

[VanessaCaputo]

Hi does anyone know a good article posting website? does it matter whether its an Australian or Amercan website where I am posting?

I am trying to increase my ranking with Google.

Thanks.

Regards,

[MarketingHQ]

Hi Vanessa, there are quite a few. The main one's are:

Ezine Articles
Article Dashboard
Go Articles
Articles Base

I think ezine are the biggest and certainly one you should submit to.

As an aside, if you write a blog and it has an RSS feed you can also submit your feed to RSS feed directories which can boost your backlinks as well.

Cheers

Chris

[Aidan]

Hi Vanessa,

Articles can help your SEO if they get indexed themselves for your targeted search terms (keywords) or indexed for terms that are close to your targets. You then need to link back to the relevant pages on your site using good anchor text in those articles.

You'll find plenty of folk saying spread your articles far and wide but in practice this is usually misguided as they will not all get indexed if they are the same article.

If you are going to try article sites for backlinks then I'd recommend just the top few. Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and you could try Squidoo and/or Hubpages too if you want to be a regular contributor in those social media outlets.

Try any or all of them but note it is generally worth the effort to re-write the articles to make them unique and improve your chances of getting all of them indexed.

The thing is, it is usually not enough just to post the articles, you also need to get those articles noticed, at least a little, so you have to do a little promotion of those articles too! Tweet them, bookmark them, see if you can get links from blog comments, whatever you can.

There are numerous tactics you can try to get some juice out of article links. Another is to have the main 'pillar' article on your own site, then a unique but cut down version on Ezine (or Squidoo/GoArticles) then a further unique cut down version on Wordpress or Blogger with the last one linking to both the 'pillar' article on your site and the version on Ezine. There are several variations on that tactic but I won't get bogged down on them here.

Want to get the best use of articles IMO? Instead of using them on article sites, try to get them published on good related blogs or other related sites that welcome guest posts!

Give the site owner a unique version of the article to use as content on his site. The payoff for you is your choice of anchor text links back to your own site. Don't over do the linkback requests, 2 or 3 links back to different pages on your site is usually acceptable to the publisher and plenty of juice for you.

My 3 cents worth...

[DavidM]

Really good advice from Aiden. Thumbs up! Spinning content and getting it out there is so important these days. If you're looking for an assessment of article directories - there's a good one entitled 'The top 10 article directories'

Have a flick through and see where you should direct your efforts.

Cheers,

David

[createdevelop]

Articles are very valuable for traffic, not just SEO. We get about 20% of our web traffic from articles. We find the best article list is here;

http://www.directorycritic.com/artic...t.html?sort=pr

It also has a list of good directories etc.

[JohnW]

Please allow me to offer a different perspective on attracting SE referrals.

Yes, external links are important but their importance is frequently being over emphasised to the point where there is a danger of putting the cart before the horse.

Google keeps telling us that if you have something of value to say, published on your own website, not on an an external blog or PR release website.

I can offer an example of a website that was published in Oct 09. In Jun 10 there were 3,400 different keywords used to generate SE referrals to it. In Jul there will be close to 5,000 different keywords generating SE referrals. From launch of site there will be close to 15,000 unique keywords that have generated SE referrals to it. All this without a single online PR release or blog.

I recommend link building based on targeting links from websites with similar content topics as yours. I've read studies that report hypertext ranking point value variances of 60:1 when looking at these sorts of issues. It seems to me you can't get quality hypertext ranking values from any of the general online PR release sites.

Regs,

JohnW

[Nawor]

Aiden has give you good advice. In my opinion publishing to article directories is a dated SEO technique and now has little effect. If I do publish articles, I will publish only to a few to major article directories such as ezinearticles. The better approach is to get your article published on blogs/websites.

[Snowpie]

I use ezinearticles, but I suggest you to read their guidelines before to send them an article, make it interesting and unique, not spammy!
Also dont send only 1 but 2-3.

[Aidan]

Hi again Vanessa,

Some good POVs here on articles and backlinks and to echo what John W said you really should concentrate on your own sites content first and foremost. The best content belongs there absolutely.

The need for articles and/or backlinks from elsewhere will depend on what search terms you are targeting. If for example you are trying to get listed on Google Australia when someone here searches for "small business legal advice Cronulla" then you probably don't need any articles other than on your site!

On the other hand if you were trying to get a travel site on Google US for "hotel bookings" then you could have hundreds of great articles on your site but you would be unlikely to get listed without a great backlink profile which may or may not include getting your articles on authoritative sites among other backlink aquisition strategies.

Pick your keyword targets carefully and write good content for your own site first so the horse is firmly before the cart, to use John's metaphor.

Now having said that, do not underestimate the power of backlinks either. In fact it is possible to get ranked on the first page of Google for a term that does not appear on your page at all if you have the right backlinks!

Search Google for the phrase "click here" and you'll find an Adobe page in the top few results. Now see if you can find the phrase "click here" on the page? Thats the power of anchor text in backlinks at work!

[kbrookes]

I personally agree with JohnW on this one.

While it's something I keep harping on about, Google's entire existence relies on the relevancy of its search results.

For example, this article points out that Google has started to devalue business directories - their own local search is becoming more relevant.

I predict the same will happen with article sites. By contributing to them, you're not contributing to your own site's weight of SEO material. The articles are all there to provide backlinks to the authors - and typically are cut-down versions of something they've written for their own site.

In reality, they're a cynical ploy to horde content which generates massive PageRank and therefore traffic, in turn allowing them to see huge returns on advertising.

The content is created by others for free in the hope of getting a smattering of traffic back and some trickle-down PR. If these article aggregators didn't exist, authors would get much more value for their effort by having greater PR and more traffic directed to their own sites.

Worse, the article aggregation content is never as comprehensive as what you'll find on a 'genuine' site. If I inadvertently find myself at an article site, I click away, click away....

I don't think I'm alone.

If I'm not, Google will then begin to devalue the PR of article aggregators and those of us who've spent time building our own content will be rewarded.

It may not happen that way, but I don't care. Some things I'm stubborn about - I just don't like article aggregators.