EzSEO Newsletter # 32
Andy Williams ez SEO
ezseonews.com
Hi again
This week we will be concluding the mini-series on writing articles. If you have missed any in this series, don't worry, I will be releasing the entire mini-course in PDF format and you can download a free copy of that next week.
As regular readers know, for the last couple of months I have been without a telephone or ADSL at home because here in Tenerife they ran out of telephone numbers in the area I moved to. This threatened to close down the newsletter for a while. Well, in the last 10 days I have had both a telephone and ADSL installed. I guess I am back.
OK, enough rambling, let's get on.
This week:
1. Pre-release offer next week
2. SEO Website Builder Sites. DO they still get good rankings?
3. Sick of spam? A great free tool
4. Submitting Articles to article submission sites
4.1 Resource Boxes
4.2 Article Submission Sites
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1. Pre-release offer next week
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Today I can announce a new webmaster tool of mine going into pre-release this week. Pre-release? Yes, pre-release. Those of you who have subscribed for any length of time know that when I release a new product, it goes into what I call pre-release where it is available only to my newsletter subscribers, only for a few days, and at a big discount. If you use Wordtracker, you may be interested, and you will be able to get it at a big discount in a pre-release offer next week. Keyword Results Analyzer - Wordtracker Version.
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2. SEO Website Builder Sites. DO they still get good rankings?
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I received an e-mail this week asking me if sites built with my own software SEO Website Builder software still get good rankings in Google despite all the changes going on at Google. I immediately went to Google and did a search for my test sites and their positions for the keywords I chose. I then created a web page with those rankings which you can see here:
http://www.seo-website-builder.com/27-05-2004.shtml
I also see a lot of discussion on forums (and in e-mail) about my tarp demo site in particular and whether it makes any money. I have always kept figures to myself and will continue to do so, but when I created this rankings page I felt I should also include a small screen shot from the last few days at Shareasale (the tarp merchant I use is there). You can see that screenshot on the URL above.
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3. Sick of spam? A great free tool
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This is a very quick mention of a free tool I found this week, and I love it. 0spam is a filtering system that wont cost you a cent. My good friend Pamela Heywood (who also lives here in Tenerife and runs a great site at: http://www.pamela-heywood.com/) recommended it to me a while ago, but I have been so busy sifting through e-mail to remove spam that I did not have any time left over to install a spam filter (which I thought would take a few hours to sort out). Well, now I have ADSL at home, I had time to install (if that is the word) the filter and it is working great, and it only took minutes to set up. Go over to http://0spam.com and get yourself a free filter.
While I am on the subject of spam filters, this week I got a newsletter from Incredimail (the e-mail software I use and have done for years). They have just released an upgrade to their software which has a built in spam filter. This software gets better and better. Best of all you can get a free copy. Check out the Incredimail web site.
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4 Submitting Articles to article submission sites
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In previous newsletters in this course we looked at writing and using articles on your site to improve your rankings. Today we will have a look at an even more valuable use for your articles.
When you write an article you can publish it on your own website. In doing this, you add valuable content to your site that search engines love. That is the whole point of this mini-series.
With each new article you put on your own site, you attract more new visitors to your site, increase your own rankings (by linking to your more important pages you can increase their link reputation and PR) and future-proof your site against search engine changes. It is only common sense that search engines love content and will never penalize a site for too much content. The only thing you need to worry about is not to over-optimize your article pages, and make them useful and unique.
In addition to these benefits, have you considered what other webmasters and visitors might think about your site as the number of useful articles grow?
They might consider your site as:
* A great resource that is relevant to their own site therefore worth linking to.
* A site that is obviously search engine friendly and not one that the search engines are likely to penalize (and therefore a good site to offer a reciprocal link with). Remember that webmasters are getting more and more choosy over who they link to and rightly so. If you link to a site that is penalized by Google, there is a good chance that you too will find your site penalized (bad-neighbourhood syndrome).
* An authority site that deserves inclusion in the directory they are editors for (e.g. DMOZ has human editors who will accept or reject a site based on how valuable a resource they believe it to be. Other directories work the same way).
* A valuable site worth bookmarking or telling their friends about.
Whichever way you look at it, publishing articles on your own site is a valuable exercise that can only benefit you.
If you write articles yourself, then these articles can work for you in even bigger ways. There are sites on the Internet that accept articles from unknown writers on a variety of topics. The idea is simple:
* You write an article of interest to other webmasters in your niche.
* You include a resource box (we will look at those in a minute) with your article.
* You allow other webmasters to publish your articles on their site as long as they include your resource box.
OK, so what is the point of this?
Well, to see how this is a benefit to you, let us first look at the resource box mentioned above.
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4.1 Resource Boxes
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The resource box is a small addition to the end of your article which tells the reader some information about you, your products or your site.
Here is an example resource box:
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Dr. Andrew Williams is the author of the SEO Course "Battle for the Top 10", and publishes a free weekly Internet Marketing Newsletter. His SEO Website Builder software provides a way for Internet novices to build profitable, professional looking web sites without SEO knowledge or HTML skills.
Sign up for his free Internet Marketing Newsletter today!.
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OK, anyone who publishes one of my articles on their site must include this resource box at the end of the article. That is the agreement webmasters make when publishing other peoples articles taken from the article submission web sites.
You will notice that my article:
* Includes a little information about me. That helps to spread my name around the Internet and obviously the more often people hear your name, the greater your reputation grows.
* Includes a teaser about some of my products, which might interest the reader of the article.
* Includes an ACTIVE link to my newsletter sign up page.
This active link in the resource box is priceless. He are a few benefits I get from it:
1. It may send my site visitors, which is always a good thing. Visitors who visit from a resource box are probably visiting because they are interested in something that was said in my resource box. Maybe they want to sign up for my newsletter, or just hunt down a bit of information about my Site Builder software. Either way I win.
2. The active link in the resource box will increase the Page Rank and the link reputation of my newsletter sign-up page. The more people who publish my article on their site, the greater the reputation of my page for being about "Internet Marketing Newsletter".
Note that this is a non-reciprocal link. Webmasters link to me (as a requirement for using my material) and I do not have to link back to them. This type of link tells the Search Engines that my site is valuable. Non-reciprocal links are definitely the best type to get, and publishing articles is a fabulous way to get them. Imagine publishing 10 articles, and each article is taken up and published by 5 webmasters. That would be 50 incoming links to your page. It would not be long before your page climbed to the first page of Google results.
3. A lot of webmasters who publish the article on their site would probably have it on a page of its own. You may be the only outbound link on the page! In terms of PR benefits, that can be huge.
I am sure you can see the immediate benefits from allowing others to publish your articles. This may well be the quickest and best way to work your pages to the top of the search engines with relatively little work involved.
If I had the choice of either 10 unreciprocated links or 20 reciprocated links to any one of my sites, I would choose the former. I really believe that unreciprocated links will benefit search engine rankings far into the future, whereas I cannot say the same thing about reciprocal links.
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4.2 Article Submission Sites
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OK, I thought I would finish off this min-series by mentioning a couple of the many article submission sites you can make use of. These two have been very valuable resources to me:
Go Articles http://www.goarticles.com/
This site has a lot of articles just ready for publishing on your website.
Yahoo Groups Article Announce http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce/
A Number of great groups to announce your articles to. Subscribe and get articles delivered to your inbox.
If you want to find more of these on your own, it is often just a case of typing in:
submit article + keyword
or
"article directory"
Into Google, where keyword is a keyword relevant to your article.
OK, that is the end of this mini-series. Next week we return to a "normal" newsletter, but I am planning another mini-course which should start in a few weeks.
Have a great week!
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If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please send then to me at [REMOVED - USE CONTACT US LINK]. Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site
if you want it. That's extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.
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