If you follow me on Google+ then you know that I am a big fan of SEOMoz’s Whiteboard Friday videos.
A short while ago Rand Fishkin, the host, posted a video titled Article Marketing: Mostly a Scam.
As someone who runs a content marketing business that focuses on guest blogging and using articles and other content as a way to engage customers, build trust and rank more competitively I was horrified at first. After all, here is someone I trust for valuable information degrading my work.
In fact he starts right off referring to article marketing as this when it comes to SEO:
- Scummiest
- Lowdownest
- Dirtiest
- Ugliest
- Messiest
- Nastiest
- No goodnesst
Ouch.
Getting to the Point
Of course, Rand went on to state that these labels can’t be attached to all forms of article marketing. For example guest blogging and other forms of authentic, trustworthy content used to build trust and authority for your site.
When approached in this manner, content marketing can be one of the best tools for SEO.
The type of article marketing that took a beating in this edition of Whiteboard Friday is one that has become all too popular with SEOs and businesses who are looking for quick results in the Search Engine Results Page and don’t understand what cheap, poorly written, garbage content can do to their reputation or conversion rates.
Let me explain.
A common content marketing, or article marketing, strategy is to quickly write a keyword rich article and include a certain number of links back to pages on your site. If you use the right variety of keywords as anchor text for these links you used to be able to get some serious link juice for your efforts. Regardless of how crappy the content of your article was because they were often submitted en masse to article directories where not many people were even reading them.
When it became easy to pay someone 5 bucks to write this type of content the industry flourished. Even small businesses with a limited budget could build a steady stream of incoming links to help their SEO efforts.
Now for a few hundred dollars more you could also buy some article spinning software that would replace certain words in the content, which already sucks, with synonyms that you suggest making the article look unique to the search engines. By spinning your 5 dollar piece of trash you could now have 10, 20 even 100 “unique” articles at your disposal to use on your site or for your article marketing campaign.
Pretty neat huh?
For a while this strategy was a great way to quickly bump your pages up in the search engine rankings. And we all know that those coveted top results are a sure way to get more traffic
However the engineers at Google and Bing are pretty smart and it doesn’t take them too long to figure out that people are trying to game the search engines so they update the algorithms so that these cheap tricks no longer produce the desired effect.
Earn Respect, Build Trust, Convert Visitors
Going back to Rand’s presentation, he did state that there are noble ways of article marketing. It’s just that the term article marketing has taken on such a bad connotation that most people use it to refer to those tactics meant to cheat the system.
Guest blogging, or guest writing, is used to describe the credible manner of marketing through content.
Guest blogging has the same result when it comes to link building. Each guest post you have published on someone else’s blog helps strengthen your SEO. Use the right keywords, the best anchor text and post on the right blogs and you can see a real difference in how well your pages rank.
But guest blogging can offer a great deal more than just link building. It can help you attract targeted readers and/or customers.
For some of my pages, and my clients’ sites, I have noticed that I get just as much traffic – if not more – coming from the links in my guest posts as I do from the search engines.
People who are already interested in the topic read my work on another reputable blog and click on the link back to my site to learn more. Not only does this build traffic, but these visitors read more pages than those coming from the search engines and the bounce rate is much lower.
They also tend to convert at much higher numbers because I was able to build trust.
If you are interested in learning more about how guest blogging can help your company or web site, feel free to contact me. I would be happy to discuss the different solutions available.
If you are using guest blogging in lieu of crappy article marketing techniques let us know about your successes as well as any challenges you may have faced.
