Article Marketing
for Organic SEO - Questions and Answers
By John
Alexander
For this week, I wanted to stop and address a few questions that I often get asked about the subject of working with articles for organic SEO. There has been quite a bit of misinformation in the marketplace concerning the best way to work with articles for organic SEO.
We do teach in depth article marketing sessions on how to do effective article
creation at our live hands-on SEO Workshops across the United States, Canada, Australia and
Asia. One of the best ways to learn about effective article marketing, is from someone who is already very successfully doing it. That's how I first learned. So for today, let me address some of the questions I get asked most often.
Question:
John, can you give me your definition of what it means to create quality content?
Answer:
The term implies exactly what it suggests. Articles should be written in a way that is helpful, engaging and useful to the reader. Articles should ideally be fresh and original and should be written to satisfy the reason that initiated the user to search in the first place.
Question:
When you say that articles should be original, does that imply that if an article is published in more than one place, that it will penalized for duplicate content?
Answer:
When I say articles should be 100% fresh and original, it implies that they usually will do better than let's say an article published in 500 different places. But to clarify one thing, Articles are not considered duplicate content, but they are similar to news and can be considered syndicated content.
Question:
But what about those who say articles are duplicate content and can end up being penalized by the search engines.
Answer:
The important thing to remember, is that to get to the truth about something, we need to listen or observe what the search engines themselves have to say. So for example, if someone claims that articles are duplicate content or
equivalent to Spam, then they are not in line with the fact that both Google and Yahoo actually have Creative Common areas where they encourage the public to republish other people work under Creative Commons license.
So if articles were considered Spam, then why would search engines themselves encourage people to publish these
articles and do article marketing? Plain and simple they wouldn't do it if articles were considered Spam.
There is one area that you may want to pay attention to if you begin publishing articles. You would not probably want to publish the same articles across a huge network of Web sites that you personally own.
Question:
I wanted to ask about article submission tools and how effective they are?
Answer:
Some of them are okay, but just not really quite as effective as they were back in the early
days (because people are using them to submit all types of
content.)
My best advice is to work with high quality publications and just as you might do in the real world, watch for opportunities to build relationships with editors and publishers. You can also, in time build your own distribution channel of
Directories and publications that are focused on the type of content you write about.
Question:
Do you recommend that writers use article spinning tools to create dozens of variations of an article. Is there any danger to doing this or is it
an okay practice?
Answer:
Personally, I'm a big believer in writing fresh, original content as opposed to trying to use these article spinning tools that create variations of the same article. My advice is to beware of any automated that have a button to push that will instantly and automatically put words or phrases into your content in a general or random manner. Do not use this type of tool when article marketing.
It will just not work very well.
Remember that Google and other search engines are using things like NLP or "Natural Language Processing" to reward well written content. You really want to focus on the aspect of content that is well written. Auto synonym replacement and spinners create unreadable garbage at best. It's like the early days in SEO when some folks would create doorway pages with very little value and all they did is clutter up the search engine's index
unnecessarily. Back in the day, most people who were doing doorway pages often were
embarrassed to have them even show up in the search results.
Best rule is, don’t use automatic content spinners.
Question:
Are there any other options for helping you to create valuable content on a random basis?
Answer:
I have never seen any tool that let's you create quality content on a random basis.
(The keyword here is random) I know there are some marketers who make claims. But here is the easiest way to determine whether or not to use a tool.
Ask yourself if the end result is something that you would be proud to have your name associated with or not. If it looks or reads very poorly to you, it will certainly not be useful to your customers either.
If you wouldn't publish it, neither will others.
I should also make a distinction that IF you have a tool that allows YOU to identify and input word structure, synonyms and phrase replacements on a word-by-word or phrase by phrase
replacement based on logic rather than randomly, then this is quite different, because the content is being re-written or paraphrased by you.
The result would be content that makes sense, reads well and flows well because you did write it.
Question:
But is this type of tool available and I don't understand the difference between this and any other article spinning tool?
Answer:
The primary difference is that words and sentence structure are not generated at random by a machine. This is the type of tool that does require some actual work on the writers part, but the end product is a number of articles that are all well written, quality content that you would not be ashamed to sign your name too, because unlike article spinners, it generates extremely well written
content that you have authored.
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About John Alexander
John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search
Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his
partner SEO educator Robin Nobles. John
has
taught SEO skills to people from 87 different countries world
wide. John is also Director of Search
Engine Academy with localized Search Engine Academy
training centers where the Complete SEO Mastery Workshop and 6
Month Mentoring program is taught locally to business
owners and individuals in
communities across North America and and
Internationally in Asia and Australia.
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