So far in the 30 Days To Better SEO series we have talked quite a bit about changes that you can make to your sites to get them to be more search engine friendly. Those steps are crucial but I can’t emphasize enough that most of what the major search engines use to rank pages is links. The web pages that have the most link juice are the ones that look the best and are therefore the ones that rank the best. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask all use links to determine the strength of pages.
Links are the most important aspect of getting traffic through SEO and I’d like to walk you through some different methods that you can use to get them. Most of you will be familiar with most of these methods. Some of you may have discounted their effectiveness but I know many of you who are using them effectively.
These methods are going to be presented in no particular order and the first one we’re going to talk about is EzineArticles.com.
When you’re trying to establish rankings for keywords, it’s very important to get links from strong sites. Links from strong sites will influence your rankings significantly more than links from weak sites. EzineArticles is a relatively strong site. It has about 2,300,000 pages in Google’s index and is a PageRank 6 site. It’s also crawled like crazy by Google because it’s updated so often.
The basic premise behind EA is that you can trade an article for two links. In other words, you create an article of 250 words or more and EA will let you put two links at the end of the article. You can use one link to point to your homepage and the other for a post page, or you can use the links to point at separate sites. I wouldn’t recommend pointing both links to the same homepage simply because you’ll lose most of the value in the second link.
Writing An Article Related To Your Topic/Keyword
One of the most important things to keep in mind when you use EA is that you want the article that you submit to be related to the keyword you want to rank for. If your keyword is ‘red race cars’ you could write an article about ‘Why The Fastest Race Cars Are Red’ or about how ‘Red Race Cars Always Win Races’. Links are a lot more effective when they come from related pages, and EA uses the title of the article as both the HTML title and as a heading on the page they put the article on.
Creating The Author SIG – Resource Box
When you submit an article to EA, the links go in the box called Author SIG – Resource Box. In order to get the links, they have to be entered as HTML code. If I wrote an article about ‘red race cars’, I would use something like this for the resource box:
<a href=”http://yoururl.com/”>Red race cars</a> are perhaps the most important cars on the planet because they are the most used of all the <a href=”http://yoururl.com/race-cars/”>race cars</a>.
When you create your resource box, make sure to type it in yourself. If you copy and paste it probably won’t work because WordPress changes the quotes to curly quotes and curly quotes aren’t recognizable with HTML.
Using EA To Build Links
Links from EA have pretty good strength to influence rankings. That said, one article alone probably won’t change everything overnight. I would start by getting at least a few articles for EA so that you can get a few links. Use slightly different anchor text for each article. If I created 4 articles about ‘red race cars’ I would probably use ‘red race cars’, ‘race cars that are red’, ’shiny red race cars’, and ‘cool red race cars’ for the anchors of my links. This will help you to rank for different variations of the keyword and will also protect you from Google bombing. Google doesn’t like to see too many links that are exactly the same.
It takes more than EA to get a solid ranking for most keywords. What we’re doing here is getting a little better each day and after 30 days everything will have a solid, cumulative effect.
There’s a (slight) limitation to the keyword variation argument: EA doesn’t allow you to anchor a string that’s more than 3 words long, unless one of the words is a word like “the”, “for”, “with”, or something like that.
Otherwise, it’s indeed a very good link building resource. Not to mention that a good article can get you a good burst of targeted traffic (short term benefit), and if it gets picked up by enough webmasters that are too lazy to produce their own content, then it can build up PR, which in turns strengthens your links.
@Will, actually this is only true in some cases. You will find that it is very much up to the person reviewing your article. I’ve found that if you have been contributing articles for a longer period of time they’ll let you have more than three words in your links. I know that they rules state otherwise but….
If you don believe me please try checking out some of the most contribution authors. You don’t have to look far to find some with more than three words in a link.
/Mikael
Thanks! I’ll try slipping in a couple long tails next time
EzineArticles is definitely a great source of links. However, I’ve seen some articles that have three links in the resource box and also three to five or even six long tail keyword strings that point to external sites. Mikael is right – it depends on the person that reviews your article.
Mikael is right. I’ve got just over 100 articles in EZA and they’ve never mentioned when I go over their anchor text limit. Of course I do it naturally and never try to abuse it.
I am trying to do the 100 ezine articles in 100 days challenge (I think I get a free coffee mug if I do it, woo-hoo!) but beyond the free mug I figured it would be worthwhile to shoot for it just because I know it will help my sites. I’m a little behind, but it’s been pretty nice working with them, their interface is easy to use and I’ve seen some positive results for rankings.
thank you for sharing this info
i´ll try it next time
This is by far the best site I’ve come across in recent memory. All of these great information for free, thank you Court. I know I shouldn’t be asking questions here. But can anyone recommend me a good hosting? There are reviews out there but all of them refer you to one or another cause that’s what they are pushing and not because is necessarily a good one. Let me thank you in advance.
Derek,
I use Hostgator. They’ve been very good to me so far. I think they’re widely regarded as the best hosting company right now
EzineArticles is a good site but it seemed that there are some anomalies behind the acceptance of submitted articles.
Will,
Thank you for your recommendation, I will check their hosting plans right now. My apologies to Court for using reader comment board as my personal Q&A board.
I’ve used article marketing to get high rankings for several websites and Ezinearticles is definitely the best article directory. This method will work if used wisely and for a keyword that isn’t very competitive. But even in competitive niches it’s a great way to get some good links.
Court, besides EA are their any other manual article directories that you recommend?
I use ArticleDashboard (PR5), ArticleBase (PR5), EasyArticles (PR4) and GoArticles (PR5) as well.
Then on top of that comes UAW but that is a totally different game…
Do the articles need to be fresh or can we use content from our blogs?
I have a hard time deciding what links work best. I have used article publishing, directories, Social bookmarking, exchanges, one way links from other sites, comments on D-List sites, etc.
I have tried to look at the results from this and determine what is working and what is not effective, but I can’t find a good tool that helps me understand which links help and which don’t. What do you suggest to analyze back links?
I totally agree it depends who reviews your article-one day i get a article published ok with 3 word links another article another day gets knocked back-the more articles you submit to ezine articles the better it gets,so does your writing-I also use Goarticles as they are a little more flexible in their guide lines,however feel Ezine articles have more clout with search engines.Thank you for such a great site and the free information supplied.
Court & Mark,
This site rocks. Thought you should know.
QUICK QUESTION though:
How effective are directory links/submissions compared to blogroll exchanges?
Is 100 directory links as useful as 100 blogroll links?
Thanks!