Articles and what to do with them
-
I realise there is a wealth of information out there regarding content etc. But Im getting slightly confused about what to do with my articles for my site.
Each week we have 3 articles written, 2 x 300 word articles and 1 x newsletter
The question is what the heck do i do with these I apologies but I'm so confused.
Do I publish them to my site?
Get them on a blog?
Publish them on a forumHow many times do i get them published and whats the best way, and after all this , is this the right thing that Iam doing, and what else can i do to
a) attract back links with this content
b) get it published
c) get google to index this and benefit from the contentsorry if this has been repeated , but different people/companies offering different advice.
Thanks
-
nick I have had similar problems with "experts" in this field. Everything's expensive and is most probably not going to work out the way the expected. So far I have had more help in moz than any seo company has provided. I just keep reading and it's starting to get better. It's no fun being screwed over repeatedly but it seems to be a right passage as a webmaster.
-
Keri asked an extremely important question....
You probably know that the niche you are in is ultra super competitive. So what I said in my first answer to you will apply......
** If you are in a competitive niche I think that this much work is not going to move the needle for you at all. Why? Anybody who is serious about winning is spending way more effort.**
-
Thanks for your answer , but me deciding and deciding wrong costs me money at the end of the day. Hence why I'm asking
-
yes , its ended up one big mash up , needs an overhaul but so scared of losing rankings and money we are in a mess
-
Are you speaking of the site that's listed in your Moz profile?
-
Ok the reason i wrote this is because I'm getting mixed messages and still as above , people contradict each other.
You can decide "what" you want to believe or "who" you want to believe.... or a combination of the two.
Offers of ... "quick".... "easy".... "cheap".... Are going to be the wrong offer 99% of the time.
-
Hi Nick,
Would be happy to take a look at your site see if there is anything we can do for you.
Good thing about the digital age you can always bounce back!
-
i would be willing to pay for some help , but we have had some really bad experiences.
one company took our adwords account and ruined it , we were getting 40 apps a day and they managed to being it down to three , then blamed the world and its daughters .
we have employed an seo company who in three weeks has emailed us once ??
we employed an affiliate company , world leader who charged us a fortune to get 20 enquires a month and they blamed the world too.
Google changes have messed our home page , we don't know why as there have been so many changes to google we have lost the will to live.
Want to cry really
-
Glad it helped, if you're finding openers are not working out you could look into your subject lines or the content or the emails, unfortunately it can happen. It's like SEO just keep playing with it until you find that sweet spot.
-
Ok the reason i wrote this is because I'm getting mixed messages and still as above , people contradict each other.
If we take a vanilla site and pack it full of 1000 articles and blogs and its about "pickled eggs" , i understand google will index this, but will it give my site any importance with zero back links ??? and therefore will my content be sat there getting no visits ?
Great tip about the newsletters , will be using that from now on, normally we send a full article to our 40k news readers.
however only 5% open the email which is heart breaking -
Don't forget you can have a "sign up for news letter option" and then you can even start to build up some email lists of people who are engaged in your brand. you can use the likes of mail chimps to send for nearly no cost.
It can be a great way to announce new articles or new items on sale or for sale etc. There are some really great tips above though so this is just another helpful bit of advice.
-
You can talk with your customers, and talk with the person/people who talk with your customers. What questions do they get all the time? Write content about that! You'll have content for the web that meets the needs of your users, and you'll free up time of the staff that deals with the customers. Some of the posts on the Moz blog have come about because an author has answered the same question so many times in Q&A that they wanted to write a blog post on it, then be able to just give people a link to that post as the answer.
-
If you give your content to other websites that will place them in competition with you. This feeds existing competitors and creates new ones. It also creates duplicate content in the search engines that can result in your site being filtered from the results or demoted with a panda problem.
Your goal should be create a site that is a unique source of value. If you give your value away then nobody needs to visit your website.
You are going to receive conflicting advice on this. I hope that you have the strength of mind to build a site of unique value.
-
Hi Nick,
The question you have is one of the most basic questions that even seasoned SEO's don't have a perfect answer for. But I would like to compliment you for the fact that you are moving in the right direction.
The primary goals you have mentioned are different in nature and would need different strategies:
a) attract back links with this content - If this is your main goal then this article should rather go on high visibility forums and websites related to your niche. If the content is engaging enough and is crisp you can exploit social media too. However unless you are a product based company or fall into categories of Sports / Music & Entertainment / Arts & Photography / News & Media / Deals & Promotions , chances are that even the best written content won't be able to generate too much traction on social media.
b) get it published - By getting it published, if your objective is outreach, use some good PR sites like http://www.sbwire.com or http://www.prweb.com . If you have a decent budget I would recommend writing high quality content and spending to get proper exposure through high visibility PR distribution sites. While more is always better, every business has limitations in terms of resource allocation for indirect marketing methods such as content generation, your best strategy would be to produce high quality unique content that has the capability to grab eyeballs and shares. Please do not forget to make all links no-follow in your press release.
c) get google to index this and benefit from the content - Google indexes everything unless specifically denied access to using no-index tag. Remember a golden rule for content creation, create your content keeping end users in mind not google. Google by default would pass authority to content that is perceived well by your audience. That's what google is trying to refine over the years, make search result relevant for consumers.Let's say for example you write an article keeping google indexing and authority in mind and (without going into details) you manage to rank 1 on google search results for the targeted keywords. Now when traffic comes on to your website, and they don't find this content relevant to their search, all you would see is a high bounce rate on the website and no conversions, which I don't think could be the goal for any legitimate business.
So I would strongly recommend that you need to analyse your requirements based on goals and then develop content accordingly.
I hope my little explanation is of use to you. Please feel free to send me any questions you may have.
Wish you luck and success.
Regards,
Prateek Chandra
-
I spend almost zero time link building. Instead, I spend that time on more or better content.
Most people spend almost zero time on content and all of their time on linkbuilding.
Which website do you think will be the most successful? You know where I am placing my bets.
-
Thank you that's very informative, do we need to link in content creation with link building .
or is link building dead ?
Thanks for for spending the time
-
Each week we have 3 articles written, 2 x 300 word articles and 1 x newsletter
First, I am glad that you are making content and working to get a plan for using it effectively.
I don't know who you are competing against... but 900 words a week is not going to do much in most niches. If you are in a competitive niche I think that this much work is not going to move the needle for you at all. Why? Anybody who is serious about winning is spending way more effort.
If what you can afford to do is about 900 words a week, I would make one 900 word article with great photos and graphics and publish that on my own site. My newsletter would include a one paragraph teaser for this artlcle that the subscribers can click through to see the whole thing on your website.
Look for content that you are already making and get twice the use out of it. When someone writes an email to you with a question, write them a fantastic reply and then beef it up to a nice article.
I run a three person office. We have two people working 90% of their time on content and another person who takes care of orders, inventory, shipping, just about everything else. Most of our content is going up for adsense but we also solicit some retail sales through a small store on the site and a couple of niche retail sites.
Try to double your effort on content and when you can do that try to increase it a little more.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google displays multiple titles for same article. What does this mean?
I've linked to some screenshots so that it what I'm talking about makes more sense. Sometimes, when I perform a search, I see an article with the correct article title listed as the page title in the SERPs. Other times, I see the wrong page title – it's a generic somethin' or other done by my client's web design company with a bunch of keywords thrown in. The latter (not the correct article title) also appears at the top of the browser tab for every article on my client's site. I know this is bad, but what can be done about it? This would never happen if my client used Wordpress or some easily modifiable CMS, but they're using a proprietary one maintained by the group that designed the website. open?id=0BxB_dYL1ylGgVVF1dHlwdXp2dFU open?id=0BxB_dYL1ylGgdWJjdlJoRlRIR00
Technical SEO | | Greenery0 -
Unpublish and republish old articles
This might be a dumb question but we had an incident where a new SEO guy thought it would be a good idea to un-publish and republish all of your 200+ blog posts which we carefully scheduled over the last 6 months. He did not update the content and did not change anything. His intention was to send out google a sign to recheck the sites or something. Now, the entire blog looks like it wen't live in one day, which I don't think is good? Should we load a backup and get our old publishing dates back, should we keep it with the new publishing dates? What are the consequences? Will it effect our SEO?
Technical SEO | | Funlocity1 -
An article we wrote was published on the Daily Business Review, we'd like to post it on our site. What is the proper way?
Part 1
Technical SEO | | peteboyd
We wrote an article and submitted it to the Daily Business Review. They published the article on their website. We want to also post the article on our website for our users but we want to make sure we are doing this properly. We don't want to be penalized for duplicating content. Is this the correct way to handle this scenario written below? We added a rel="canonical" to the blog post (on our website). The rel="canonical" is set to the Daily Business Review URL where the article was originally published. At the end of the blog post we wrote. "This article was originally posted on The Daily Business Review." and we link to the original post on the Daily Business Review. Should we be setting the blog post (on our website) to be a "noindex" or rel="canonical" ? Part 2 Our company was mentioned in a number of articles. We DID NOT write those articles, we were only mentioned. We have also posted those same articles on our website (verbatim from the original article). We want to show our users that we have been mentioned in highly credited articles. All of these articles were posted on our website and are set to be a "noindex". Is that the correct thing to do? Should we be using a rel="canonical" instead and pointing to the original article URL? Thanks in advance MOZ community for your assistance! We tried to do the leg work of our own research for the answers but couldn't find the exact same scenario that we are encountering**.**0 -
Links from PubMed (nlm.nih.gov) not appearing in backlinks for articles
Content from our medical journals gets indexed by the National Library of Medicine / PubMed on a monthly basis. The link to the full article appears in the upper-right corner on PubMed, yet I'm unable to find PubMed (nlm.nih.gov) backlinks in the reporting tools. Example:
Technical SEO | | aafpitadmin
Article Title: Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection in Children (allintitle query)
Article URL: http://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0115/p141.html
PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21243988 The PubMed link is to http://www.aafp.org/link_out?pmid=21243988 ,
a 301 redirect to the article, http://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0115/p141.html Any idea why this link isn't appearing in backlinks? This isn't just for one article, we have roughly 2,000 articles from 1998 to the present. Articles from the past 12-months are access-restricted, and after 12-months the articles become public.0 -
Video in article + Video section = Duplicate content?
Hi, I have a website that create news articles that sometime includes videos (my own videos). Those videos are accessible in the video section too, most of the time with the same title as the article but with less content. All the video pages list related videos. Should I: Canonicalize the video page to the article Add a link in the video page to the article Add a link in the article to the video page All of the above Other Thanks for the help GaB
Technical SEO | | TVFreak0 -
Should i do "Article Marketing" for my quotes site?
Hello members, Should i do Article Marketing for my quote site to have quality backlinks to my site? will it improve my rankings?
Technical SEO | | rimon56930 -
How long does it take for an article or a page to be listed by google
Hi, my question is a two parter. I think i must be doing something wrong. With my site map, it is set to show different section of my site while on my old site the site map listed every single article - i am not sure if setting it to each section is correct, can someone please advise me on this. The second part of the question is, how long does it take for an article to be listed by google. This article on my site was written today http://www.in2town.co.uk/lifestyle/holidaymakers-ignore-the-importance-of-travel-insurance-according-to-survey Holidaymakers Ignore The Importance of Travel Insurance According To Survey but when i check to see if google has listed the article yet by putting in the whole title, it does not come up, i even added the website name at the end and still it did not come up. This is worrying me a bit as a lot of my articles are news stories which means they are current articles so if google is not picking them up then no one else will be. can anyone let me know what i should be doing so google picks them up quicker please.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Best practices for temporary articles
Hello, I would like to have expert inputs about the best way to manage temporary content? In my case, I've a page (ex : mydomain.com/agenda) where I have listing of temporary article, with a lifetime of 1 month to 6 months for some of them. My articles also have a specific url like for ex : mydomain.com/agenda/12-02-2011/thenameofmyarticle/ As you can guess, I got hundreds of 404 😞 I'm already using canonical tag, should I use a in the listing page? I'm a bit lost here..
Technical SEO | | Alexandre_0