Give Up On This Article Or Not?

Did you submit it to google directly?

What about the same articles on your web 2.0 properties are they getting ranked? How competitive is this keyword and what is the estimated traffic for it?

Sounds like you put it on Squidoo or something.

It's hard to say what to do but you could try copy and
pasting the complete title address into Google and see
if it comes up. If it does, it's indexed - it's just not
showing in the search engines due to the high number of
competition.

Hope that helps.

Asher

Don't give up, Shannon. But consider some alternatives.

I absolutely cannot fault a membership to Brad Callen's Search Marketing Elite. I learnt so much from that you wouldn't believe.

An alternative to Article Marketing is Video Marketing. YouTube videos are normally indexed by Google 2-3 days after posting. I'd recommend going in for lots of long-tail keyword phrases (i.e. less competition) as opposed to a competitive keyword phrase to start with.

You can use a normal camera/camcorder to record yourself or Camtasia Studio (free for 30 days) if you're a little camera-shy. This is awesome software that allows you to record your computer screen.

Once you've created your video, use TubeMogul (free) to upload your video to various video networking authorities. Viddler, Dailymotion, MetaCafe and YouTube are the best and all you need to do is set up accounts with them first. It's all 100% free but can have you raking in traffic in days!

As far as what keywords to optimize for, check out the Google Keyword Tool and also the Free Keyword Tool from Wordtracker. Check out search phrases with 30-60 searches a day.

Also, get a copy of the Google Toolbar and get your baclinks posted on High Authority websites with high PR (PageRank).

I'd recommend posting on:

YouTube
Facebook
WikiPedia
Squidoo
LinkedIn
Myspace
MyBlogLog
eHow
GoArticles
EzineArticles
Buzzle
WikiHow
Wordpress

You can also submit your backlinks to authoritative directories such as dmoz.org.

Hope this helps in some way

Keep trying, if you think the article has lots of potential. If not dump it.

A competitive keyword will need FAR more than 10 backlinks to it in order to be successful these days, and it will also need some time to mature.

I usually don't see stable rankings for one of my new pages for up to 4 months, no matter how many backlinks I send to it.

SEO is difficult primarily for the reasons that you are running into right now - you write the article, do some work, get some backlinks, and then you're stuck wondering if it's worth it because:

1. You have no idea if you've done enough to rank well
2. You often have to wait several weeks to several months to get your answer

My advice would be to go ahead and work on something new for awhile and watch your rankings for the original article. If 3-4 months go by and you don't see any positive movement, let it go.

But if you do see upward movement in that time, you know that you can make more progress with the article now that it has matured some. Go back and start adding more backlinks to it. make the article better by expanding on certain points to make it more useful to your readers.

It takes a lot of faith, and more guesswork than I would like, but if you stay with it long term, you'll ultimately see the results you want!

Hi Shannon,

I agree with Mike here. 2 weeks and 10 backlinks aren't nearly enough. Depending on how competitive it is it could take months.

If it is a keyword that is going to land you great targeted traffic that will turn into money, I would continue at it until you see it reach the top. Just have confidence that it will and keep on getting back links to it.

Best,

Matt

Thanks for the advice! It is a very broad search term, high searches and high competition. But in doing my research, I noticed that a few of the top results didn't have many backlinks or indexed pages, so I thought I might be able to knock it out of the top spot.

I've social bookmarked it and have started a link wheel, which I just learned about. I have not directly submitted the article to Google, so I'll give that a try.

I might also try taking the keyword from a different angle and seeing how that goes...

I'll just keep on plugging on...

Love,
Shannon

Sometimes you can overdo the backlinking. If you're backlinking to yourself, Google seems to pick up on it. If other people backlink to you, it's worth something. Don't ask me how they figure it out, but they do.

One good technique is to keep revising the article. Google's algorithm sees this as improvement in quality. Revise, ping, wait, revise, ping, wait... eventually you'll come up.

Shannon,

Give it some time and definitely get more backlinks to it. Give the June W-A.net newsletter a read. It talks about how many you need and where to get them.

Shoot me an email if you wanna talk about it.

I personally would not give up on it yet. Where is it? On your site? Squidoo? An article directory?

Allen

p.s. You must really be liked around here. You have some really good help here - DON'T GIVE UP!

Post on to Dofollow forums and blogs. It might help you.

I really appreciate everyone's advice.

Allen, I'm using some of the advice from that newsletter in addition to creating a link wheel. That's why I've been so flummoxed as to why I'm not getting better results. This is the first time that I've really tried to do a backlinking campaign to an article.

Love,
Shannon