Asheville SEO expert touts value of article marketing and Goggle submission
Saturday, October 16th, 2010
As an Asheville SEO expert I am often asked about how I am so successful at establishing relevant backlinks for companies looking for local SEO. One of the top approaches for generating highly relevant backlinks from established websites is article marketing.
Well written and high quality articles which are aimed directly at your target local audience can produce valuable links with clout when seeking local SEO. Internet articles should not be too long (I keep mine to around 300 to 500 words) and should always provide some useful and quality information which will inform or stimulate your target local audience. Used correctly, having a large number of articles in circulation will increase your exposure and generate many quality links. However, you want to focus on quality over quantity as high-quality articles are far more valuable from a local SEO perspective.
Having your articles displayed on popular directories will enhance the frequency of search engine crawls and be a tremendous benefit to you in page rank. If you are unable to take the time to produce this content yourself then outsourcing article production is a winning strategy that will pay off in the end. The posting of content each day is a key component of page ranking.
This is an opposite strategy to local SEO blog post marketing, which can take two distinct forms, none of them quite like article marketing. When posting for search engine crawls on blogs you want to rotate between “quality” blog post of around 800 words maximized for your local target audience and containing useful and valuable information for them, and “maintenance” blog post which are shorter (and possibly more frequent) and are focused on search engine crawls.
Submission strategies to Google are also important. You can see the prominence of Google in this search engine market share graph:
After your articles are out on your blog or another article site, you can submit then to Google. The earlier you submit, the sooner Google can crawl and extract them. The result is that you’ll boost your publishing power, and Google will process your most recent articles more quickly, since they recrawl all News sitemaps frequently.
Signing up for Google Webmaster Tools and verifying your site helps a great deal. If your site is currently included in Google News, the presence of the News Crawl link on the left indicates that the news features are enabled. If your site isn’t included in Google News, you can request inclusion.
Google wants only the most recently added URLs in your News Sitemap, as it directs Googlebot to your breaking information. If you include older URLs, no worries (there’s no penalty unless you’re perceived as maliciously).
For various reasons, when crawling an article, Google News checks to make sure it can find the article body. If your article body is broken up by tags, ads, sidebars or other non-article content, they may not be able to detect the actual article body, and reject your article as a result. In addition, if you place the beginning of your article’s body near the title in the HTML, they’ll be more likely to extract the correct title and snippet.
If you reuse article URLs, Google’s system may have difficulty crawling and categorizing your stories. In addition, make sure your article URLs have at least three digits that don’t resemble a year You can get around this requirement by submitting your articles in News Sitemaps. Also, please note that session IDs can confuse Google’s crawler, and Google may not realize that two distinct URLs actually point to the same page.
If this seems complicated and time-consuming…well, it is, a bit. That’s the reason many folks turn to a local SEO expert when attempting article marketing. It’s easy to get the little things wrong and end up with a lot of work going for naught.
As an Asheville SEO expert it took me awhile to get the ins and outs of article marketing down, but I am now very proficient at it and my clients appreciate the fact that I can perform this important SEO task for them without their having to invest the time it takes to create and effectively submit new content on a continual basis.
