Back in the days before blogs and other social media sites I posted articles in article directories. And while I didn’t consider article marketing a part of my search engine optimization strategy because even then there was a lot of controversy about the usefulness of duplicate content and duplicate anchor text, I did consider it as part of my overall traffic strategy. Then earlier this year Matt Cutts put the whole duplicate content argument to rest with the following video.
Matt Cutts View of Article Marketing for SEO
A few months later Matt explained 1 reason why social media marketing could be considered part of your SEO strategy.
Matt’s View of Social Media Marketing for SEO
As a Google SEO expert, Matt’s comments about article marketing and social media marketing for SEO are valid. And while I never considered article writing as part of my SEO plan I must admit I haven’t submitted an article to an article directory for a couple of years because the amount of traffic I was getting dropped significantly when blog type social media sites like Squidoo and HubPages became available.
Article Marketing, it’s not just about the links. You do get links from doing it, and you may or may not know how backlinks are critical to ranking well in search engines. But like I said, it’s not just the links, you need to think about real advertising and clicks from potential new customers.
So let’s do the links part first, how do you get those important links?
Articles give you links in two ways: If you create helpful content that is useful to people, then people will link to it as a helpful resource, this is called link baiting. As an added link bonus, you get a link or two to your site from within the articles also.
But that’s not the real reason you need to think about article marketing. Links and ranking are what comes form doing good work, and being helpful to readers.
Use Article marketing to prove your expertise by writing a good article. If you create good content that is helpful, you create goodness for your reputation and brand. Then the readers will actually click that link to your website at the end of the article that they found useful or interesting. This is called marketing, and it’s been this way forever. Of course once you get them to your website, you have an opportunity to show and/or sell them your stuff.
I would be very interested in your views on the effectiveness of article marketing and social media marketing as part of your overall traffic strategy.