The objective of posting content to article marketing sites is generating back-links to your page. When you syndicate content, you are giving other webmasters the right to reuse your writing in exchange for leaving the links that are contained within the body of the article, intact. While getting your page out there can only be a good thing, your time will be much better utilized if you focus on setting your article up to achieve the greatest results for your overall search engine optimization campaign.

Before I go any further regarding article marketing and search engine optimization, I would first like to make it clear that you should always spend your time writing “best of web” type quality content. I fully understand that not everyone is capable of writing at an extremely high level, but at least try to proof read and spell check when you publish because your articles will spread exactly how they are posted.

Grammatical mistakes make you look unprofessional, and webmasters will skip over your articles in favor of others that don’t have such drawbacks. Since the goal of article marketing is getting others to publish your work, a few obvious mistakes can virtually guarantee you have wasted your time.

Getting back to the topic, the single most important factor that will affect your article marketing success is the topic you chose to write about, more specifically the keywords related to it. Don’t just write article for the sake of writing articles, write with a purpose of targeting specific terms or phrases, and make sure to peak the reader’s interest or else they will never click through your links.

For example, if you are targeting the term “soccer shoes” feature the term multiple times in the content of your article, as well as other similar terms closely related to it like cleats, screw-ons, boots, etc. The title of the article should lead with the very keyword you are targeting, as well as the specific words that link bank to your article. Soccer Shoes

Taking it to the next level, the landing page of the links should also be optimized for the same terms. A focused effort of posting numerous quality articles across the web taking these factors into control and finding the right keywords will have your back-links for well targeted traffic spreading across the web, and hopefully your page ranking, too.

If you aren’t yet aware, the Internet is a tricky place filled with misinformation. If you do a web search for article marketing, you will find thousands of distribution sites, and hundreds of different products that supposedly automate the process. While it may sound like a good idea to use automation to post the same article in as many different places as possible, it is not necessarily productive.

First off, the vast majority of article marketing syndication sites receive very little traffic, so they are hardly worth posting to. The bigger reason it is a terrible idea to repost the same article across multiple syndication sites is for reasons of duplicate content, as well as spending your time and efforts in as efficiently a way as possible.

When you use automation, each article is going to look effectively the same to search engines, and they will effectively compete against each another. If Google recognizes the articles as containing duplicate content, they tend to purge the extras from the search results, in favor of the original.

If you are going to use the same article on multiple sites, your results will be much better if you re-edit the article by flipping a few sentences or words around near the beginning and the end of the article, as well as the title and the keywords you are targeting. You only have so much time to focus on article marketing, and if you spend it all re-posting the same article over and over only to have it removed, you will be wasting time when you could be doing other valuable things to increase your traffic.

How Much To Syndicate?

Overall, your content marketing campaign should be focused on adding content to your webpage, as opposed to free article sites. If your page is not filled with lots of optimized content and organized in a search engine friendly fashion, the results of sending traffic to your page will not be as potent.

When people land on your page, you would like them to click through your links and increase the value of your pages for the terms your onsite links are optimized to target. Focus on writing lots of quality content and syndicate maybe 10-20% until you get your page to a level where it starts to receive a steady stream of traffic for the terms you are targeting, and then try to implement other methods of optimization to target these same terms, and then move to a new set of terms for your next round of article marketing.

When you syndicate articles, you also must remember that your competitors can post everything you write on their own page, so you want to be careful not to give too much away for free, and always make it interesting enough that your links are hard, not to follow! At the same time, if it gets too spam-like, no one will post it. Provide good information, and your site will eventually benefit from the articles you have posted.

The single best way to peak interests is by writing articles that are longer in length than the typical article, but only posting a small snippet on the syndication site, while offering the full version from your webpage. If the content you have provided is good, you should see the click through ratio of your links, drastically increase.

Another way to increase the “hype” as well as the effects of your articles is by writing a series of high quality, high content articles and then placing links within the article to the other articles that you have written on that particular article marketing site. This will help your articles to receive a higher ranking, which should also help your site.

Analyze and Improve

Once you have posted a few articles, it is best to go back and analyze your results. Did your articles receive page views? If the answer is no, was it because the article marketing site was worthless (likely cause) or was it because the failed to use keywords correctly in the title and content of the article.  Check to see what % of people click onto your website from your articles, and if its less than 40%, try to make your articles more informative and evaluate the placement of your back links.

Next, do a web search using a sentence or two from the article, and see if anyone has re-posted your article. If no, give it more time and revisit the question. If the answer is no after two or three months, your content is likely not best of web, and you should spend more time writing quality content or hiring others to do it for you.

Measuring results is also very important. Many of the better article marketing sites will also give you the ability to see the number of times the links on your articles have been clicked.

I have achieved click through ratios of 60% using keywords like “Free ________” because everyone wants something for free, but I have also received much lower ratios when the words linked are not in a click friendly place, the signature is borderline spam, or if the content flat out sucks.

Go back and edit the articles and see if you can move the links and update the signature and see if you achieve higher click through ratios from that point forward. If not, your content may be bad or your topic a dud.