If you ever visit any of the article sites and search for an article on virtually any topic, the chances are you will be swamped with articles – many of which appear to be saying pretty much the same thing. How many articles do we actually need with “5 Top Tips for Saving Money” or “Secrets of Top Chefs”.

The problem is, there is no way to distinguish quality from dross. Since so much of search technology is based on keywords, the article that is likely to appear at the top will be the one that has the best keyword optimization or whose author has got most of his mates to vote for it.

I haven’t got a solution for this but it does make me wonder how Google will distinguish quality in the future. I can’t believe that it isn’t working hard on overcoming the reliance on keyword optimization and backlinking, both of which are easy prey to self-promotion.

In the meantime, keep sending in those articles, but don’t expect it to last forever.

I created a hub on this topic: article marketing rules.

Technorati Tags: article marketing, internet marketing, seo

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Created a new lens on article marketing tools – very interested in your thoughts.

What do you think of the theme? Not sure about it myself – only problem, not sure about any of the others either.

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Article Marketing Tips

There are many reasons why you should consider article marketing, amongst them:

• establishes credibility and trust
• provides opportunities for people to follow links to your website
• quality backlinks that have a big impact on search engine ranking

It is the final one that I would like to focus on – backlinks to improve search engine ranking. And the reason for this is that it is the cause of much mis-guided thinking. On many internet forums you will see advice along the lines of: create as many articles as you can and then submit them to as many article directories as you can. This may have worked once but not any more. Furthermore, this approach could actually damage our search engine ranking.

Look at it from Google’s perspective. If you submit articles to hundreds of directories, does that make your site any better? No. The quality of a search engine’s results have a direct impact on how many people use the search engine – and so on advertising revenues. If Google’s results are driven by ’spam’ backlinks from hundreds of article directories rather than by the quality of content, then there is a good chance that people will be dissatisfied when they click through. So it is in Google’s interests to promote quality content.

Google and the other search engines are well aware of the tactics used to inflate ranking. There is no doubt that they follow the discussions in the black hat forums and study the spamming tools. Self-promotion is frowned upon.

The Key Principle

A link is worth more if it is placed by a human third party at arms length from you. If you create the link – well that isn’t really an independent vote for the quality of your site is it. However, if Ezinearticles, where all articles are reviewed before publication, publishes your article, then that is an independent vote for content quality

Quality is All

Forget the chasing of backlinks and keep in mind – if you create the backlink, it probably isn’t worth very much. Backlinks are more valuable when they are created by genuine third parties. And how do they create the links – by blogging about your content, commenting on it and bringing it up in forums.

But why would they do this? Because your content is remarkable – original, insightful, etc

The more remarkable your content, the more it will spread virally. And, here’s the paradox, the linking will probably be more targeted to the people that you want to communicate with. Why – because the people making the comments are usually making them to people who are interested in the same things.

Not only will the links be more targeted, they will probably have a higher click-rate because they have been placed by people who have credibility with them.

And the benefits continue – because the more genuine people link to your site, the greater the impact on your search engine ranking. The higher your ranking, the more clicks you get – and so the more comments.

Quality content creates a virtouous circle of link creation. And all you did was to create the remarkable content – less work and much more interesting.

Be remarkable and others will do your link-building for you.

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