Webmaster Papers








Link Popularity: Distribute Content, Not Just Links


You've spent many hours trying to increase your online traffic with your linking campaign. You've sent out 200 e-mails pleading with other web sites to trade links with your site. Many of your e-mails bounce back.

The requests that find thier targets get rejected for numerous reasons. For example, your Google pagerank is too low or your links pages are dynamic and not static, etc., blah, blah, etc., ad nauseum. Out of those 200 requests, you wind up getting 25 reciprocal links, if you are lucky.

So, you say to yourself, "Great, now i have 25 more links!". But are these links really worth it? Do they generate any traffic?

There are many reasons why your links won't even get counted or indexed by the search engines. If your link is on a page among 100 other links, or the page is irrelevant to your subject matter, the page probably won't hold much weight with most search engines. It's also rumored that Google is changing it's algorithm to discount reciprocal links altogether.

So, what can you do to get your links indexed and noticed? Write your own content, distribute it to article directories or trade it with other related websites!

Here are 8 tips on increasing your online traffic with distributed content.

  • Try to write about popular content. The more popular it is, the more people will download it and want to include it on their websites and the more links you'll have pointing back to your site.
  • Try not to use any promotional jargon or sales pitches in your articles. If you do, many webmasters will not want to include your article on thier site.
  • Use plain English. Don't try to get too technical. Read it back to yourself and make sure you don't get tongue-tied while reading it.
  • If possible, work in your site's main keyword phrases into your articles. If your site is about online marketing, write articles about online marketing.
  • Make sure you include an "About the Author" section at the bottom. Make it somewhat short and always include a link back to your site in an anchor tag. And once again, include your keywords in the link text.
  • Proofread your article carefully. I see so many articles out there with misspellings. It just makes you look bad. After you spell check, have a friend or co-worker read it to double check for errors.
  • When you're finished with your article, submit it to popular article directories like goarticles.com, articlefactory.com, amazines.com and imparticles.com. For a fee, there are even services out there that will submit your articles to the top directories for you.
  • Make sure you publish your articles on your own website too, more content equals more traffic. Don't worry about getting penalized by search engines for having duplicate content. You only get penalized if the content is duplicated on your own domain, not if it's duplicated on other websites.

    • So there you have it. Distributed content allows you to make every link count, by creating targeted links that directly contribute to your search engine rankings, and by delivering targeted traffic on its own. And besides, it might even make you famous!

    About the Author

    Robert Raught is the lead SEO expert at Technet, a search engine optimization firm based in Washington state. He also publishes daily SEO news and articles in an online RSS enabled blog titled "The Optimizer".

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