seoFool.com

By John Elder

With Internet Marketing, it’s all about traffic. If no one shows up to your web site, the game’s over.

One popular form of traffic generation is article marketing. Basically you write an article about whatever your site is about, then submit it to the major article directories like ezinearticles.com

You attach a few signature lines to the bottom of the article with a keyword intensive link back to your web site, which is where the marketing comes into place.

Generally this strategy has two benefits.

• Your signature links at the bottom of the article hopefully draw readers to your site. In this case it’s best to write your signature like a headline to draw readers in and make them click your link. Use those copywriting skills you have for this.
• The link or links you put in your signature help to boost the number of inbound links Google see’s, thus increasing your Pagerank and helping you dominate the search engine rankings.

As far as Internet Marketing tactics go, this one’s pretty solid. There is one controversy that always seems to follow this tactic though. Go to any marketing forum and inevitably there’s a thread with a heated discussion. The controversy is whether or not you should submit an article to an article database like ezinearticles.com AFTER, BEFORE, or at the SAME TIME that you post that same article on your web site.

Some people think you should post the article on your own web site first, so Google see’s it on your site first, and assigns authority to your site for being the first to post something new.

Some people think you should post the article to the article directory first to get it out there and spread around the Internet as soon as possible.

Some people think you should do either or. Either submit it to the article databases and not to your own web site, or post it on your own web site, and not to the article databases.

So which is correct from an SEO point of view??

Well, from a purely SEO point of view…it depends. If you have a new web site with little to no PR, and you submit your article to the article databases (who themselves have a HIGH PR), then you are in effect competing with the article databases…and they will win because they have a higher PR.

Google will see the same article on their web site, and your web site. They will determine that the article database is the main web site to list at the search engine result pages for that article. For instance, if you wrote an article that was heavily optimized for the phrase “Poodle Grooming” and someone goes to Google and types in “Poodle Grooming”, the article database site is going to pop up in the results before your own web site.

And you really don’t want that to happen!

On the other hand, it may not really matter if your web site has a high PR, say 5 to 7. Go ahead and submit your article to the database sites. Your site will generally have a higher PR than the article database page and so you’ll win in the SERP’s.

If you’re interested in submitting articles JUST to get the link, then submit any old article. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to have a link back to your web site in the article’s signature.

So submit rubbish. At the same time, post different high quality articles to your OWN web site because Google likes to rank web sites that have lots of useful content.

On the other hand, if you use article marketing as more of a lead generation device, well then none of this applies. But then, I’m only looking at it from an SEO point of view.

This debate will continue, I’m sure! What do you think about it? Comment Below…

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