Searched for answers on these Article/SEO questions please help me out....

Bumping this up as it's had no replies, plus it's been lost in the back pages.

-Lee

Anyone at all....

Bumpty bump bump.....

This is starting to feel hopeless now, I'll give it one last bump. Hopefully someone will help.

Cheers

-Lee

Hi Lee,

Sorry not to have seen your thread until now. To be honest, the only time I ever look in the SEO Forum is when I've already posted in a thread (in the Main Marketing Forum) and the moderators then move it down here, and I "look at the replies later". You'll appreciate that article marketing isn't intrinsically "a part of SEO", so I don't expect to see article questions here. Not that that invalidates any of your questions, of course!

I'd hope so. I'd hope you've been publishing them on your own website first and never submitting them anywhere else until checking that Google has indexed them on your site? (This is fundamental to any kind of article marketing: you wouldn't want to give away your initial indexation-rights to an article directory, nor to take the risk that potential customers might find article directory copies rather than your own site's copies listed in a search engine, nor to end up in the long run with articles on your own site that can't outrank an article directory and end up in the supplemental index! ).

Sorry, I don't quite understand the question. You don't get a choice how you submit articles to directories? Unless you mean on your own site? (In which case, if it's a Wordpress question, again, I can't help because I'm not a Wordpress user, myself).

This is "opinion". Personally, I wouldn't ever link from one article to another, not even to another on my own site, because I want the traffic coming to my landing page. (My landing page is content-rich: it's not a "squeeze page" but it has my prominently incentivized opt-in on it, because I'm an affiliate marketer, myself, so the primary function of all my niche websites is to collect email subscribers).

But in general, I do think it's not a good idea to link from one article to another. People "clicking" have already read an article, and want to "follow up", typically, not so much to read another article?

"Getting good SEO from articles" is determined by the sites on which they're published.

This can be done by active syndication (you contacting people with sites relevant to your niche and offering them content in exchange for a live link so that you can attract some of their traffic - this is the basic model of "article marketing"), or by passive syndication from article directories (many publishers of ezines, newsletters and websites continually needing content source their content from directories, and this is the purpose of having a copy of your article there - to get it published elsewhere. An article directory is simply a stepping stone. Explained here: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5068872 )

Don't imagine that there are SEO benefits from the directory itself.

Those "backlinks" are no more than non-context-relevant PR-0 backlinks.

Even before all the 2011/2 Panda updates devalued/decimated the SEO potential of article directory backlinks, one would have needed something between 50,000 and 100,000 of those "backlinks" to confer the same linkjuice benefit to your site as that from one good backlink on a relevant authority site.

What determines the SEO value of the backlinks is primarily the relevance (to your own site) of the site (not the page) on which the article is published. This is good for article marketers, of course, because the purpose and function of article directories is to make available and supply content to the people with niche sites who want that content - and those are going to be sites relevant to you (otherwise, of course, they wouldn't want your content in the first place).

The undoubted (albeit indirect) SEO potential from "article directory copies" is discussed in the last paragraph of this post: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5035794

It's pretty difficult to get 500-word articles published in any of the places you need them to be published, to get any SEO benefits (and direct traffic benefits, of course!).

The criteria that affect this are explained in this post: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post3188316

No - articles of that length are not even acceptable to "Ezine Articles" directory. (And for me, over 4 years and in 8 different niches, that article directory has been about 100 times as beneficial as all the others put together).

Not many people want to publish 350-word "articles". Most publishers and Webmasters don't really consider that an "article", to be honest. It's generally regarded as "a chunk of keyword-optimized text to which a backlink can be attached". That's not really an article. Not what people with targeted traffic typically want to offer their visitors, subscribers and already-targeted traffic, anyway.

I typically get more than twice the traffic and backlinks from a 1,200-word article than I can get from the same quantity of words distributed as two 600-word articles, and this is very typical.

If you have a read through the article marketing threads in the Main Marketing Forum, you'll see that whenever article length is discussed, all the experienced, successful article marketers are recommending 900+ words as article length. (And some much higher than that).

That sounds about right, to me. You certainly wouldn't want it much more than that.

I don't count them, myself, but I'm sure my own keyword density is well under 1%.

Anything more than that, and - again - people won't want to publish it, because it will read a bit "clunkily".

In the title, it's important to have the keyword at the start. All the people who write articles called "5 Things You Need To Know About Keyword" and "3 Mistakes To Avoid With Keyword" are missing a big and important trick. "Keyword - 5 Things You Need To Know" and "Keyword - 3 Mistakes To Avoid" are far, far better for SEO. (I learned this trick from Chrstopher Knight, the owner of Ezine Articles, and it's been most valuable to me).

I'm not sure how much my rambling post will have helped you.

The main thing I wanted to get across is the important of not trying to use article directories to get traffic or backlinks from the directory itself. Article directory copies are for publishers, not for customers. Anything else isn't "article marketing": it's only "article directory marketing", and the people who do that are exactly the same ones who start off all the plaintive threads with titles like "Is Article Marketing Dead?" and "What Have I Done Wrong?" :p

Don't imagine that getting some customer traffic from directories as well is "gaining you something extra": it really isn't - it's actually losing you something. Article directories make their livings from all the traffic that never reaches our sites. And that's all traffic we can get, and keep, if we go about it the right way, using the directory only for its intended purpose and not falling into the trap of thinking we can benefit from trying to use it for a different purpose "as well".

There's more information on this subject right here: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post6806059

And this thread will certainly help you: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...marketing.html

Traffic from articles is worth far more than "SEO from articles": "SEO from articles" is just a slow way of trying to get SEO traffic, but SEO traffic tends to be the least-opting-in, least-buying, least good sort of traffic there is. As well as being very precarious. If you rely on Google for your primary traffic, your business can only ever be one algorithm change away from a potential accident or even a potential disaster. As so many Warriors have found out, over the last year or so, some of them to their very great cost. I admit I do get a lot of Google traffic, from article syndication giving me some remarkable rankings (just because of all those relevant sites syndicating copies of my articles), but I actually do worse with SEO traffic, overall, in every single one of my niches, than I do with traffic direct from articles (and every other sort of traffic I've ever tried, as well). This thread explains why article marketing really isn't primarily about SEO.

If you are talking about on Wordpress, it makes absolutely no difference for SEO if you publish a post or page. It is all HTML in the end.