This is the time to build some backlinks to your article, you don't always need to in order to rank on the first page, but I really do advise you to build at least some to every article. Some of the ones you have identified as being for a more competitive keyword then you might need to build a lot more.
One word of warning though, don't build all the links with the same anchor text, Google likes to see variety, as a rule of thumb then only about 60% of your links should be for that exact phrase, for the others then mix it up, use variations of the phrase, add words to it, or use ‘click here', ‘this article' ? all the sort of things people would naturally use to link to a page.
There are so many ways to build backlinks, but for articles then the two ways I recommend are social bookmarking and using a paid service.
Social bookmarking is where people ‘bookmark' sites they like and that gives the page a link then from the account of the person doing the bookmarking. You can use a free service like SocialMarker.com to help with the process of going in and bookmarking your articles, or you can sign up to OnlyWire.com which allows you to automatically bookmark a page to multiple sites, you can even outsource it for about $4 per 30 bookmarks to WLMarketing.com.
Make sure you bookmark other things you like online as well though, an account that just bookmarks articles leading to your site might get flagged for spam… (you can open a new one but you'll lose the links in the old one).
How you do it is personal preference, I like Onlywire.com as it is easy to setup and then you can do a submission in just a few clicks whereas SocialMarker.com will probably take you an hour or so to go through each submission.
Then there are linking services, places like MyArticleNetwork.com, Linkvana.com and 1WayLinks.net which for a monthly fee allows you access to a wide range of sites which you can get links from, I've used them all at one time or another. Linkvana is probably best for when you have lots of sites you need to use SEO on, the other two offer better value if you are trying to get links just to your articles.
The way those two work is you write a short article or blog post and then you ‘spin' it so that each submission is unique, make sure your link is in there somewhere (you can spin the anchor text on that as well so it rotates every time it is used!) and submit it and their system distributes copies out to their network of sites.
Each time they send the post out to a site they use variations of words/sentences which you provided in the spinning phase (we'll discuss this more later on), so that each post is not identical to the last and Google hopefully counts each link.
Now you don't need to submit one post to these systems for every article you create, if you are smart about it then when you submit it you spin not only the anchor text, but the link that is submitted, so it randomly picks a link each time it posts your content and you have links being built to multiple articles at the same time! I have had links to probably 20 to 30 pages being rotated through on some submissions!
After a week or so then check to see where you articles are in the Google, you can use a free service like this to find out where your article is:
http://www.searchenginegenie.com/google-rank-checker.html
If your article is in the first 2 or 3 pages then build some more links! If it is further out than that then consider how much traffic it is supposed to have and think if it is worth the extra effort. Any article on the front page but not in spot #1 then build some more links to as well until it gets to the top!
Drop any articles that don't seem to make much progress and concentrate on the ones that do as well as writing more of course! Now let's move onto the resource box, the most important part of the article.
Article Marketing does not have to be hard. Check out the software that I use every day to completely automate my article marketing to hundreds of the top directories.
P.S. Don't forget to check out the special bonus just for MasonWorld.com readers.
Previous Articles in this series include…..
- What You Can Promote Using Article Marketing
- How To Write a Strong Quality Article for Article Marketing
- Common Problems Encountered In Article Marketing
- Where to Submit Article for Article Marketing
- Two Types of Articles You Can Use in Article Marketing
- Getting Free Search Engine Traffic From Article Marketing – The Research Phase
- Getting Free Search Engine Traffic From Article Marketing – The Construction Phase
Hi Mark,
Just found your podcast. How does this article line up with your episode 60 on Backlinking Ethics, which I really enjoyed?
Great question. First, that article is from 2009. A lot has changed since then. Article marketing is a lot less effective. But to your question, some of those link services mentioned no longer exist and some are less effective. They range pretty spammy to not so spammy. I the case of 1WL, you can choose to make that completely non-spammy. So, I would say this sort of linking does not generally make the internet a better place, and can be spammy (but lots of people still do some stuff like this). Does that make sense?