Articles: Quality or Quantity?

[alnewman]

Hi all

I'm looking to promote my new product and am looking at using articles.

It's immediately obvious that it's fairly easy to get 100's of low quality articles created and distributed

But i suspect that, for example, 5 very well written, informative, controversial... ie genuinely interesting articles might do a lot better

ie in getting backlinks and traffic to the site

I also assume that if I use the mass distribution methods to post these 5 pieces to article directories, press releases etc (er anywhere else ??) and so on that this would be a good idea

any comments for this relative newbie would be appreciated

Many thanks

[Dave Lianelli]

Alnewman,

I'd vouch for quality. You'd have to put in less effort when you have some articles at places where potential customers are. Rather than spending time on posting your articles all over the net.

Whenever I see someone spamming the same article all over the net, I tend believe it's not a high quality piece. And that rubs off on the author...

Also, searchengines like good, unique content. Not stuff that is "spinned" or something. They want to give their users valuable information, the answers to their questions. SEO tricks that work now, stop working later. Searchengines are constantly updating their algorithms.

-Dave

[RedEvo]

Content, links, articles etc - quality will out gun quantity every time.

d

[paulgl]

It depends.

If you are the one publishing articles on your site
for your own gain, quality comes first, then quantity.

If you are talking about submitting articles to sites
like EZA, then quality is secondary. You only want the
backlinks. If you look at the articles on EZA, most
are complete garbage. They are short, filled with fluff,
and get that link in there. Most articles are not worth
reprinting. I think this is because the people are doing
exactly as I am proposing. They want to save their
good stuff for their own sites.

But note this does not mean there are not quality articles
on article sites. There are. It's just you need to wade through
50 to find 1 good one. That is one reason I ditched article
submission. I was submitting good and lengthy articles.
For what? Everyone else was doing short nonsense fluff.

Paul

[searchnology]

You have two types of content.

Content for forced backlinks: These are links you are proactively creating on other sites. The quality of the content is not as important as you are just looking for as many backlinks as possible so these can be light weight articles that are spun to hell and back if you want.

Content for linkbait: "Linkbait" is high quality content that you produce on your site that others will link to naturally over time. Typically these are articles with how-to info, tools, product reviews, data/research.

I would recommend that you do both as forced backlinks will get you a lot of lower quality links fast. Linkbait will get you some very powerful links but it will take a lot longer to get them. As paulgl mentioned, the greatest effort should go into your linkbait content.

Good luck!

[geyser]

If you want to bait links then creating quality articles will help to syndicate it or build links for itself.

[ZanyHost]

Unless your talking really really high unique Quantity, I would defiantly say quality.

[Steve Crooks]

It's quality all the way.. The trick is to create quality articles in good quantity

[alnewman]

Ladies / Gentlemen Thank you one and all. I am in your debt

Wow I love this site

[DrGUID]

From what I've learnt on hubpages, quality is epic win. They definately have some way of finding out quality writing from spun crap.

[Mrs S]

I vote for quality. If you post some well-researched articles at directories like EZA they're more likely to get picked up and published on other websites. So you get more backlinks for your efforts.

I've been browsing around on EZA recently looking for inspiration and some of the content on there is just awful!

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by Mrs S

I've been browsing around on EZA recently looking for inspiration and some of the content on there is just awful!

I know what you mean. Dang near impossible to pick up much of anything!

I have resorted to writing my own, even though I have to do a little research.
I have also paid for decent articles. There are warriors who do great jobs!

BUT...I keep the articles for myself and get better juice out of them.

Paul

[jaratvit]

Quality is extremely important and most effective. Still, the way that algorithms work online, quantity is a factor…and so is duplicate content. I built a lot of my online business based solely on QUALITY articles, but I was able to take it to the “next level” with I incorporated a large quantity of articles on top of it, too. I do believe that you NEED the quality articles to effectively use quantity articles, but it won’t work the other way around.

[seoforu]

The idea behind the article is that write a unique article ..with some interesting content which people would click..it would generate traffic..u can however distribute that article to many article directories.

[kposs]

For articles that you publish with the intention of someone reading and clicking-through, for example, you need quality information. A unique twist, something helpful, a solution to their problem.

For all articles, even those that you publish for backlinks and SEO alone, you need the articles to be well written, spell checked, etc. Even if your information is top-notch, might not work if it sounds like a 3rd grader wrote it. Even if your information is not ground-breaking, for backlinks a well written article will increase the number of sites that publish it.

[FreshPLR]

Some great points above. I would certainly agree quality is important if you are looking for long term stability in traffic, which leads to increased reputation and income.

Uniqueness is important as is the freshness of your content and this will be rewarded in the search engines. As to the points above about spinning, I would say it is far better to do this naturally, rather than have some software to try and create something that appears different.

[DrGUID]

Pages I wrote way back in '99 are still doing the business. As a native English speaker and semi-pro writer I have a huge advantage. If your English isn't great then use a spelling and grammar checker.

Look at somewhere like hubpages - there is so much horrible use of English! Write a top notch article and you can easily displace the dross.

As to article length - it doesn't really matter as long as it has the information the user is looking for. I have 200 word pages that are no.1 for some great keywords.

[mlord10]

I used to be more on the quantity bandwagon, but recently I am starting to write fewer, yet higher quality articles. I have found that these articles are ranking much higher in the search engines, and driving more traffic to my website.

The reason quantity was so popular a year or two ago is because you can throw up 20 articles/day on ezinearticles.com and get 100 views to every article you wrote. However, the game has changed, and now marketers should (in my opinion) focus on high quality content that has the ability to attract linking partners and get ranked in the search engines for targeted keywords.

This is not based on theory, but my actual testing.

[forumer147]

Quality for me too since it can outrun quantity when it comes to having articles published in your blog/site

[NicoleBeckett]

Quality, absolutely. You want readers to respect you and your business, and they're not going to if you're publishing junk just to get some quick backlinks.

Now, the ideal situation is to have a large quantity of high-quality articles!

[gatekeeper1972]

For ANYTHING You promote, even articles, QUALITY Is DEFINATELY The way to go. It goes hand in hand with the saying "Work smarter, Not harder"...

[ButterflyGarden]

Obviously quality is important, but you also need to have a reasonable amount (or quantity) in order for it to have a big effect.

[4xstore]

Anyday &anytime,quality would always outrun quantity.Whatever whort doing should be given the attention and time needed.