How To Get Other Websites To Link To Yours

The use of back-links to improve a websites Search Engine Rank Position (SERP) in search engines (SE) has been very effective in diffusing some level of black-hat search engine optimization (SEO). Black-hat SEO involves using “illegal” techniques with the express purpose of fooling SEs to rank a website favorably. Back-links on the other hand are hyper-text links from other websites that link and direct their visitors to your website. They are also referred to as incoming links.

An everlasting question on an internet marketers mind is how they could get other websites to link back to their website. The more the number of links, the higher the website’s Page Rank (PR) and most likely the better the SERP. The better the SERP the more visitors the website attracts, and the more the visitors the more sales the site can make.

One such technique is article marketing. It is so called as it uses reprintable articles to market your website. The driving force of the internet as a whole is information often referred to as content. Consequently, SEs love content, more so new, unique and/or frequent content. Article marketing targets to satisfy this insatiable need of SEs and webmasters.

An article is a literary composition on a distinct and independent subject such as the one you are reading. This is as opposed to series, book, or other such literary works. The idea in article marketing is to compose on a subject related to your website. For example for a tours and travel website one could compose an article about giving tips on dealing with jetlag or choosing a family safari. Ideally, the article should be more than 500 words but less than 1500. You then make the article available for reprint by any other webmaster. They can choose to use it on their websites, blogs or publish it on their newsletters.

The trick behind getting a link back to your website from the websites’ whose owners choose to use the article is in the resource box. A resource boxes is a widely acceptable format of including hyper-linked text at the end of your article with a little marketing message. It is usually a sentence or two. In here you should add a link pointing to your website. As reprint content, an interested webmaster is only allowed to use the content as is – they can neither change the content nor the resource box.

Each website that uses your article automatically gives you a back-link. Highly informative content tends to attract wider publishing by other webmasters.

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Getting The Most Out Of Articles

As discussed last week, a big advantage of using articles to market your site is that you can position your articles to be effective in improving both your website’s PR (Page Rank) and SERP (Search Engine Rank Position). This is made possible by the author resource box in which you determine the quality of link you get. PR has implications on how popular your site is while SERP determines how much traffic and consequently volume of business your site experiences.

To get the most off your article marketing, it is not enough to provide reprint content within your site. You need to submit them to article banks or article directories for wider exposure. Article banks are websites that exclusively hold reprint content. Among their targeted audience are webmasters looking for content for their websites, blogs and newsletters.

For even greater exposure, you should submit the same article to several articles banks. There are several hundreds of article banks online you can submit to. However there is a drawback to this. Submission involves a process of logging into your account, inputting title, category, author resource box etc. This makes article submission time consuming. To navigate around this, invest in an article submission software like Article Submittter Pro or Article Robot that automates the process.

One more tick in getting the most out of an article marketing campaign is consistency. Submitting at least an article a week is a sure way of creating more back-links.

Search Engine (SE) bots or spiders that scout the net looking for content and links to index take time to find your links in both article directories as well as websites using your articles. For some reasons, the SE algorithm that determines SERP does not index all your back-links permanently. They find all the links then keep some and discard some. This results in to a bell curve in the number of back-links to your site over a period of a few weeks. The back-links first increase as the SE bots finds then, then reaches a maximum and finally starts to decrease as the algorithm settles in on its choice.

Consistent submission of articles to as many article banks as possible takes advantage of the bell curve by extending the maximum indefinitely. As the first article starts to lose some of its back-links, the second one kicks in to maintain the maximum. In reality this technique result to progressive increase of your back links because the links that the SE bots settles on also accumulate. Article submission services like Article Marketer.com have solutions that automatically queue your articles for consistent submissions.

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Finding Free Content For Your Website

The attraction to infringe on copyrighted work to use in your website is mainly driven by the fact that these kinds of works are either demanding to create or are specialized content. Either way, there are some sources of content you can use to get copyright free content or those allowing some level of use legally.

Free content is defined by Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, as any kind of functional work, artwork or other creative content having no significant legal restriction relative to people’s freedom to use, redistribute and modify the content. In particular such content is referred to as public domain.

Content in the public domain by definition does not have any rights whatsoever. Such content include works whose copyrights have expired or those whose creators have expressly stated as public domain. It can be used by anyone as they find befitting. However the reworking of a public domain can be copyrighted. For example if you redesigned a public domain artwork then you can copyright the new redesigned form. So you can also get such content and rewrite to fit your website and you will be protected by copyright laws.

Unfortunately, just by the nature of such works, they tend to be old and not exactly fashionable. The alternative is to use what is referred to as “copyleft” content. Though the term is not a legal term like copyright it is in common use. Copyleft content refers to works characterized by the author surrendering some but not all the rights under the copy rights laws. For example they may allow redistribution and use without pay but restrict reworking the content or charging for it. Copyleft keeps the work from completely falling into public domain.

Such content is usually copyrighted under General Public License (GPL), under Creative Commons or similar agreements.

You will find text or written content with minimal restrictions in article directories. Article directories are websites that hold thousands of articles on different topics in categories. You can pick any article and use in your website free of charge. Restrictions include using the articles on an “As Is” basis. Usually they carry an attribution to the author. Such article directories include EzineArticles.com, Isnare.com and GoArticles.com among other hundreds.

For images and pictures it becomes harder to find completely free content as they are a more specialized work. But you will get royalty free images at a fee in Stock Photos or Photo libraries. These sites include FotoSearch.com and Inmagine.com. Also recently you can get free video content at YouTube.com and Google Videos to imbed on your website for free.

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Article Marketing And Duplicate Content

For article marketing to be effective, you need to distribute your articles widely. As discussed last week, the use of article directories is most effective. Equally important, the articles need to be picked up by various webmasters and reprinted in their websites, blogs and newsletters. A resulting effect of article marketing then would be duplicate content around the web. Duplicate content is availability of the same or closely similar content in the internet.

Some quarters believe that duplicate content is penalized by Search Engines (SE). They argue that SEs indices would be bloated by duplicates which donot add value to the internet and as such SEs would penalize any content that is duplicated. The penalties speculated include decreased Page Rank (PR), dropped Search Engine Rank Position (SERP) and even complete de-indexing i.e. a complete removal from a SEs index or database. You will commonly come across statements like, “You cannot rank well with dupes”, referring to duplicate content.

Others hold the opposing view that a duplicate content penalty does not exist in the simplistic explanation above. They hold that a dupes penalty is more complex and it just does not penalize all duplicate content. They point to all major news websites that borrow content from each other as well as from common agencies word for word, as proof.

Furthermore if a dupes penalty existed in such a simplistic fashion, then article marketing would be ineffective for PR and SERP. However experience has shown that article marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods online. Even further some article directories that are wholly duplicate content have enviable SERP and PR. Examples include EzineArticles.com and ArticleDashboard.com.

The opinion on which this article is based on is from the authoritative MattCutts.com blog. Matt is an employee of Google the lead SE. He would obviously point to a more than fairly accurate direction to the matter. Responding to a question at a conference as to whether or not Google penalizes duplicated content, Matt explained that the SE would serve what it considers the best page. He did caution though against dupes within same domains or replicating a whole website on another domain,

Matt’s assertion is proven by the indexing of thousands of the same content in different domains. A search for a widely circulated article “101 Ways To Build Links in 2006” serves back over 100,000 backlinks in different domains. This proof of just how effective article marketing can be.

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