Article Marketing / Article Posting

[SEOWizards]

I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website.

I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites.

today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things:

1. my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston

2. just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use)

(The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.)

I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag.

I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc.

There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences.

If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too

Thanks SEOMoz!

[Francisco_Meza]

Hi Matthew,

if you haven't heard of the Penguin update, you HAVE to learn about it. It was an algorithm change on April 24 2012 that hit sites like squidoo. Many people have abuse article marketing (spinning) to try and get more rankings.

What I would recommend is to make some friends in your industry be using Followerwonk. Post on YOUR site and perhaps they can link to you. There are many blog posts on how to do this.

Also i recommend you read chapter 7 http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

[Textbroker]

Unfortunately, article directories didn't carry much link juice to begin with, and as Francisco said, Panda and Penguin have pretty much negated them as SEO tactics entirely. You might want to look at guest blogging, but make sure your articles are really something your readers will enjoy.

Good luck!