High Quality Article Marketing Still Helps SEO Results

Article marketing for SEO is a tactic that writers and publishers use to distribute content to other websites.

The articles often have links back to the parent website or to the author’s profile on that site. Ideally, the link is “dofollow”, which passes along SEO value. Otherwise, it may generate clicks or a boost to the author’s or website’s brand and reputation.

The phrase “article marketing” developed a bit of a bad reputation because of spammy, low-quality articles on spammy, low-quality sites. Search engines eventually penalized those sites until they went away.

But article marketing is simply the practice of marketing articles to other websites. It is no different than guest posting or freelance writing for websites. It’s just a matter of doing it right and respecting search engine requirements. Focus on quality.

Anyone interested in building site audience and search engine rankings will go to one of these sites, sign up for an account and start writing. Writers have three ways of getting published:

1. Writing for a site that accepts almost all articles, such as HubPages or Medium.com.
2. Pitching an article to a site that may or may not accept the article, such which is typical for major sites that accept “guest posting”.
3. Pitching an article to a major site that pays for articles and may or may not accept them.

Article Marketing Basics

The typical article consists of three elements:

• The title (or headline)
• The body
• The resource box. The resource box usually includes a brief biography of the writer, plus one or two links back to the writer’s site (also known as link building).

When search engines discover a new article on these sites, they initially may rank it high in their results because of the size and importance of a site.

Like any other web page, whether it gets a good ranking more and more depends on the quality of the article — length, grammar, originality, usefulness, photos and other factors.

The writer’s site gets value from the backlink, which in turn enhances the writer’s site in the search engine results. Uniqueness of the content improves the article’s ranking as well.

In addition, if the title, body and call to action in the resource box are good enough, visitors will click on that link and come to the writer’s site to check it out.

Getting More Clicks

The single most important part of the process is the title followed by the first paragraph. It is the title and summary description that are displayed by the article sites and the search engines.

If they are well-written, interesting or catchy, people will click on the title link, click on the site backlink and drive the articles higher in search results. If they are sloppy or dull, people won’t click on them.

Be aware that it can take at least dozens of articles to make an impact. It also takes patience and fine tuning the title, body and resource box if the article doesn’t produce any meaningful impact after several days.

Quantity Versus Quality

Besides learning the process, another consideration for writers is whether to focus on quantity or quality.

Which approach is better? Is it a large number of short and quick articles, or a small number of high-quality articles?

As the search engines have evolved their standards, it has become clear that quality matters more than quantity.

In fact, Google has announced it looks on mass producing articles for numerous article sites may trigger a ranking penalty.

So it’s far better to concentrate on writing high-quality articles for high-quality sites that have a good domain authority and growing traffic.