Article Writing for SEO
My friend Phil, the copywriter, recently asked me a series of questions about article writing and SEO. I asked him if I could publish it here and he said yes - so here goes!
Phil: A quick question. How exactly do copywriting articles sitting on a zillion different directories and on my website help with SEO? The articles don't contain my web address and the keywords are not unique. So how do the search engines link my articles to my website? Explain for me please.
Christine: Well the thing with articles is as follows:1. You are right if you say that the articles are not unique. This is a problem. This is why you should slightly vary the text of your articles when you submit them to different article directories so that they are not 100% the same.
2. They MUST contain a link back to your website else they are completely useless. What is supposed to happen is not necessarily that the link is INSIDE the article, but as you submit the article to the article directory, you also submit what is called a 'Resource Box'. This is a block of text that contains information about you and your website, and this box MUST contain at least one link back to your website, in fact, most places allow 2 links and these should be used to the max.
The article must be published with the resource box by other sites. So the 'article' does not just consist of the article text alone, it is actually 'article content + resource box' that is published as a whole
So, it is supposed to work as follows:
- you write the article + resource box (with links back to your site)
- You publish the article (and slight variations of the content) + your resource box on various article directories
- Other people trawl the articles directories, like your article and publish it, WITH your resource box, on their websites. True, it is then a duplicate of an article that already exists in the 'parent' article directory, but hey, it works....
If you do publish the article on your own website as well, you should also make sure that THIS version is completely unique, so that you get the most benefit out of it.
Phil: Thanks, that all makes good sense. But how does a unique article on my own site help with SEO?
Christine: For a variety of reasons.1. Google uses a 'secret recipe' algorithm to decide which websites to place at the top of the search engine results. Some of the factors that it takes into consideration when it decides whether a site is trustworthy or important enough is how much content it has. There is no doubt that sites with more content tend to win out over sites with little content. Adding more content to your own site therefore helps to grow your site, making it more important and trustworthy.
2. People use words that are grouped together in phrases to search for information on the Internet. They might therefore look for 'copywriting services' or 'good copywriters' or 'copywriting in the UK' or 'web page content' or 'copywriting secrets' or 'copywriting courses' or 'copywriting information for website owners'.... You get my drift? Now, Google (and the other search engines) keeps all the pages of your website in its database.
If you have a page devoted to 'copywriting secrets', when someone looks for information about 'copywriting secrets' there is a chance that Google might decide to haul out your page to present to the person searching for information about copywriting secrets. If you don't have any information about copywriting secrets on your website, well, the chances are very slim to zero that your site will ever appear if someone searches for 'copywriting secrets'. Of course there are other factors involved as well, apart from the actual content on your own site, but trust me, content = visitors. Since the question is not really 'how are articles (or content) on my site good for SEO', but 'how are articles/content on my site good for visitors'. This is really the main benefit that you get with adding content to your site - see point 3.
3. Good content draws visitors and links. If you publish good content on your site and other people come across it and they like it, they might post a link back to it on their site as a reference for other people. This means that a) you get a link back to your site (VERY good for SEO) and b) someone might actually click on the link and visit your site!
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