Link Building via Enhanced Article Distribution
The writing and syndication of articles with strategically placed links has been on the SEO palettes of Search Marketers over the past couple of years and has led to some effective link building campaigns for some.
Search engines however are catching up to the process of mass distribution of content links, and the old style of throwing the same article out to multiple distribution channels, fly by night blogs, and low rank sites is leading to duplicate content issues and worthless omitted results.
Graywolf has published a fantastic blog post entitled Getting More Out of Article Distribution Websites which lays down a nice how to of keeping a similar link building strategy – with more TLC – and how the end result can lead to long term link relationships.
Here’s a quick step by step:
1. Write about 12 versions of an article instead of one.
2. Slowly ‘trickle’ them out among distribution channels.
3. You may want to select one distinct form of the article for each channel.
4. Don’t forget ‘unique identifying text’ in each article to track reprints (and see if they are linking).
5. Do some competitive intelligence to see where your competition is contributing articles.
6. Contact those sites and provide unique content articles to them – this will help your client AND the publisher, as original content is like candy to search algorithms.
7. Don’t try to pass duplicate content over on these publishers you have built relationships with. (I love this quote, it’s so true) “don’t be a doofus and offer unique content and give duplicate content, it’s like lieing to your girlfriend, eventually you will get busted”
8. Once you notice popular or well ranked sites picking up your distributed content, contact those owners about providing more content.
I think the moral of the story is quite similar to public relations and blog networking – building trusted relationships with media will get you much more notice and better results than automation in almost all circumstances.
