Here are a few tips you want to keep in mind when submitting to article directories, not only to help your articles have a higher PR but also to help them get indexed!
Importance of tags/categories
A lot of you might not put a lot of thought into your category or tag choice but it is actually really helpful to select appropriate ones when submitting to article directories like ezine articles that have high PR related to tags or categories
Let me give you some examples:
on ezine articles “Health and Fitness” has a PR of 5: http://ezinearticles.com/?cat=Health-and-Fitness
If you go down in the category of anxiety you have a Pr of 4 http://ezinearticles.com/?cat=Health-and-Fitness:Anxiety
While sadly I cannot see if ezine articles since their post Panda changes in February still put importance on tags, they used to be quite important before their massive site layout change. For example an article about a book review on skincare could contain many tags that are common and might have PR such as “health” “acne” “skincare” “nutrition” “book review” and if you tag your article with all relevant tags with PR your article would appear on all of these (until you are pushed off due to newer articles filling up the page). Much better then putting random tags that noone uses! Ideally I would try to find some high PR tags or categories that also are not used to death by other writers. Obviously tags like “health” are very popular (and most other tags that look like category names) but maybe if you are reviewing a health book you could instead put it in the less used book review category! Anyway, I am not sure if ezine articles still has pages indexed with tags BUT the tags that usually has Pr in one directory usually also has some in other directories so I definitely was re-using these all the time, they definitely also work for wordpress blogs when some article submission services/tools allow you to include them.
The gist of what I am trying to say is this, do not ignore your selection of tags! They can give you an initial boost of PR in your article that translates into your website. Many of my websites which had links from articles containing high PR tags not only often got a Pr of 3-4 on ezine articles, but that went to my website too which indicates that it was probably a strong link. Of course over time it might lose it’s PR because it will get pushed off the first page of the tag but it is a nice boost and it will help get your article indexed if nothing else.
How I do resource boxes
I do not think I ever got into detail for this but basically I write them completely about the subject and I barely even mention myself. The simple format is basically. If you want to find more info on x, make sure to check out my blog about this topic and even y. Or another simple one is Hopefully you enjoyed this article, for more information about x and y head to my blog! Don’t copy paste this… I do not use that EXACT one because usually I add a bit more info about the subject. But barebones, it’s basically that. I remember reading in the forum that some diretories (such as ezine) are much more strict now on what they accept but I can’t say I ever got an article refused using this format.
Linkwheels for article directories
I sometimes do linkwheels within my article submissions. This is for a few reasons. The main one is articles posted to ezinearticles are always indexed very quickly so I often have one of the two links going to another article or backlink source that often does not get indexed without help. Often, these are a go article submission or something like a Squidoo/Hubpage (Infobarrel seems to get indexed quickly). Another reason I like to do this is simply because I tend to think the backlinks will be more powerful. I also have a theory that additional links to the same website on a webpage (even if a different URL) are discounted but this is hard to prove so I may or may not be right. I just feel it would make sense for google to have the most weight given to the first anchor text + url given to a specific domain (or inner page in that domain). However I tested it extensively at some point and the second link in a page does help (I just think it might have diminishing returns for each additional link to a different url that is part of the same domain…).
As you can see from the picture, I do not have the full linkwheel linking to my main website because those are detected and discounted by google. So if I really go down the path of a bigger linkwheel I make sure to have some not link back to he main website. the second link can be used for another random backlink somewhere. These can be time consuming to do but the main thing to keep in mind is to not have some huge chain of links always linking to the same website.
Since I might start with creating a squidoo lens (because it can easily be edited later) I would probably then submit an ezine article, and basically build the above linkwheel in a non clockwork fashion.
Due to approval times, it can be a bit annoying to submit another article another day so I sometimes use redirect plugins. Good ones for this are affiliate cloaking plugins such as the free pretty link. I used it a lot until I was able to get a pre release discount on Ghost URL which is what we use on this blog, it’s a bit more advanced but for doing the redirect trick I want to talk about, it’s completely unnecessary. Anyway, the trick is to make one of your articles link to www.randomdomain.com/ezinearticlelink. BTW, www.randomdomain.com/ezinearticlelink does not exist as a page/post but once your articles are approved you could make www.randomdomain.com/ezinearticlelink redirect (make sure it’s a permanent one which is 301 and not 307, so it keeps the SEO value) to the actual ezine article. You can get creative with this redirect trick and use it for way more other things but this is something I did for a while and while I just wait for the articles to be approved now, I felt like sharing this trick for those who feel it would help or for the creative people that this might spark some ideas!
Images
I just wanted to mention that for most article submissions that you can attach an image to, I almost always do it. Who knows if it has any SEO value, I just do it for the readers of the article so it looks nicer and hopefully “sticks” and does not get labelled as spam or whatever. I usually put my keyword in the “alt” tag of the image too if I can (always do it on your main money sites, easy way to tell google what your image and maybe page is about!).
Next article will probably be a service review, if you guys have any topics you would like me to cover let me know in the comments and I might do it :).
would be great to hear about how you save yourself from adsense/google prespective…
all the things you are doing consciously or unconsciously to avoid being banned or deindexed form google ( happened to me :()
are you login to your adsense account with different ip, are you submitting to directories with different ip’s…
would be great to hear all the things you think about it Alex because after all if google banned you nothing is really matter…
thanks!
I understand why you are worried about that due to recent events but ultimately the only protection you have from Google is to provide a website that offers value to visitors so whenever it’s manually reviewed it’s not just looked at as a “made for Adsense” website. I only have one adsense account and the only protection I have or whatever you want to call it is that I have about 2-3 hosting accounts. The domains I test stuff on are separate from my adsense ones. the main reason I do this though is that I might eventually link them to my main money websites so I want them to have a different ip address.
If you want to reduce the chance of Google hurting you, try to build a website on a community and look for other traffic methods then SEO (lots out there)
Hey,
Can you give us some more details on what you were doing before you got de-indexed.
Like how big were your sites, how much content, ad placement and how fast you were building backlinks.
If you do any of these things wrong you can get de-indexed so i might be able to point out what caused it for you.
Cheers.
Do you get more mileage, post-panda, from guest posts than from article submissions?
I know of people that were making a few thousand dollars from adsense/amazon on squidoo/hubpages etc.. that took a MASSIVE hit because of it, so I’m hesitant to use it.(I’m still getting my feet wet in internet marketing).
It’s hard to say which one gives me the most “mileage”, they simply are both useful and you should have both. Making money off Squidoo/Hubpage is not what I do, I simply use them as backlinks… I don’t try to get them ranked. I do not like controlling my web properties that make me money 🙂
also Alex you think the placement of the picture in the article is matter for seo? were do you put your pictures?
Anywhere that fits the text, I doubt it matters.
Alex can you please remind me again were exactly you put your adsense blocks and how you create them and put them in your sites ? ( i understood you doing it all manually) , but how exactly? all the videos i see in youtube are about using some plugins to adsense..
@moran – check the forum for my post on how to insert adsense into your blog posts manually. Alex, states in his guide where he puts his adsense blocks.
Try taking a day and read this entire blog + comments and take notes… I actually took 2 days… then if I had more questions I would ask then. I have this little green book with all the steps and refer to it daily… then when Alex states a new tip, i jot it down 🙂
Ya Toki wrote about that in the forums, as for placement, my goto setup is the 336*2xx on the top left and a 728Xsomething (large horizontal rectangle) near the bottom. This changes from site to site sometimes. For some reasons different things seem to perform better but my “goto” setup is usually the highest generally, I tried many other things and it’s rare that it changes much and even when it’s a slight improvement I often reverted it back to this setup because it’s not too invasive for the users…
thanks a lot i’ll check it out!
Great stuff Alex, thanks a lot!
Bit of newb question here: when people talk about linkwheels in general (2.0 sites), I often hear that it’s best to make sure all those sites have a unique ip address. How do you accomplish this though?
they all have different ip address because they are the web 2.0’s owners range of ip address, wordpress/com/blogger.com etc all have different ones.
Alex did you see there is about to come out Article Samurai software, what are your thoughts about it? are you about to purchase it? its weird i didnt see there is a schedule options there which is pretty sucks
I actually have been in the beta for it, I’ll probably buy it but right now it’s available as a beta discount for $100/month… Super expensive. If they truly up the price once it goes beyond beta testers upgrading then wow, this is gonna be really expensive. I do think I saw results from using it in beta but it lasted only 2-3 weeks so it’s still early to tell. Part of my 5 website case study that comapres UAW and AMR has one domain that is only using AS (Article samurai) So that will be great to compare :).
awesome – would be great to hear your results from it.
Ya I just bought it, we’ll see how it performs 🙂
Hey Alex,
How are you doing titles on content for your sites? Like if a keyword is “Tennis Elbow Relief”, would you have something like “Help Tips For Finding Tennis Elbow Relief”?
Also, I find that if my titles are way too long for recent posts in the sidebar, Artisteer will cut them off thus making me have to go into the CSS to give them extra room. Have you found using the left or right sidebar yields better results for an issue like this? Or, should I be using categories in my side menu instead?
What you choose to do with the layout is your choice, depending on if you like better recent posts or categories… My titles are not usually that long so I don’t mind if a few here and there do not work but I only use recent post on a few sites, not all.
As for titles that depends, but I like to cut it shorter usually.
Hey Alex, as far as the resource box on ezine, I’ve noticed many people suggest to link to your landing page rather and one article, rather than 2 keyword-targeting pages. Is that because you’re mostly looking for traffic through re-publishing rather than page rank from the backlinks? Is the 1 link to landing page, 1 to an article usually the best route?
Know this is for alex, but I always link to my landing page and an another article on another site. But I do some weird shit when it comes to backlinking so…. =P
Theirs no best route, I often do what Becker does too and often I just link to 2 different pages of the same domain. It just depends what I feel like building backlinks to at the time.
Alex, i see your blog not have the forum yet, so i will ask you a little question here (if you want to answer it)
– i have a 2 new website (about 1 month MNS with EMD) im on first page but they are stuck in the same position for over then 1 week.
For LB i used AMR especially and used 2 ancors (just to look a bit natural in the eyes of google) ….. The sites that are in front of me are authorities websites.
Softwares for LB that i can use are AMR and Senuke.
Can you please give me a strategy, a tip, a explination or something to get over those websites?
I didn used to much yet senuke,,,,,,because everytime i made some forum profiles didint saw any changes in serps, and to be sincere i dont know a good strategy to use it.
I think this is a question better for alex, but in order to pass authorities your gonna have to get links from authoritys. Paid links and .gov .edu and other authority site links might be your ticket my man
thx Becker for your answer….. yes i asked alex……because i watched your videos and you said you are more a seller and alex with the seo. I saw the post signed by alex so thats why i asked here.
Nice videos man, i subscribed for the ebook, i look forword to it.
And one more question where is the link to make an account on your blog to put my pic?
its a gravatar account you silly goose
http://en.gravatar.com/
It shows your avatar on any blog you post on
thx Becker, i did it.
hey guys, when getting a pingback from a backlink we’ve created and posting it as a comment on our webpage, after the backlink has been indexed by google is it a good idea to remove those pingback comments as it could allow google people to see that the artcles have been spun, etc?
also, when creating backlinks for a newly created webPAGE (not webSITE) does the same recommendation of waiting 3 months before backlinking it intensely apply? Or can you just start creating about 20 backlinks a day for a newly created webPAGE?
Thanks
20 backlinks per day from the first day that it is indexed is not going to make problems with google. From my experience
Alex,
Do you ever spin the content that is already posted on your main (money) sites? OR is that content exclusive to that site only?
Thanks
No I don’t bother spinning it. You could if you wanted.