Are articles still benificial and how best to promote them?

[Robdob2013]

Hello,

I'm trying to promote a new site doing things differently moving forward if needed in order to prevent getting google slapped while being as efficient as possible..

We have a main site which manufacturers materials. we also have a blog on blogger.com every week someone in our office writes an article about something related to our area of work and within the article has a varied keyword or two embedded within the article they are writing...

My questions are as follows:

-1- should be change our blog site address from oursite.blogger.com to blog.oursite.com?
-2- would it be beneficial to have a link from our main site to the oursite.blogger.com
-3- We also have a ezine account, would it be beneficial to also post this same article perhaps with some minor changes to our ezine account so that it would start to get more visibility from other sites or is this now possibly a no no?
-4- should we be now usin nofollow links in our articles?  if we do use nofollow links aren't we losing the benefit?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

[TommyTan]

Hi,

1. Yes, definitely have the blog under your domain.  It provides more benefits than not doing so.  You can either create a subdomain or a subfolder for your blog.  Blog.website.com or website.com/blog

2. Whether you have a blog outside or under same domain, you should have a link on the main website to drive taffic to the blog.

3. If you do not rewrite the article and simply post the same article to ezine, it is not beneficial.  Posting on ezine and article directories is an old tactic and doesn't work as well now.  However, these directoies can definitely give you more views but not good for SEO.

Create a blog under your domain and post frequently so your site will get the freshness update overall.  Keyword research before publishing and include them in your article.  Provide informative articles and make sure to share on Social Media sites.  Social Signal is slowly playing a part in SEO.

Hope this helps.  Please let me know if you have more questions.

[Robdob2013]

Thank you for the info and insight..  I have a couple more questions if you don't mind:

-1- What about links to my site from my articles, can they be follow links instead of nofollow?

-2- as you stated I believe e-zine style promotion is old tactic, can you suggest some more new tactic ways, or if its to lengthy can you direct me to a good article describing these

-3- any other input or suggestions is well welcomed..

Thank you..

[TommyTan]

1. If you don't want to share your link juice, then use the nofollow.  You should let your links link natually instead of manually adding nofollows to links.  The following 2 links can provide you with more information on the nofollow internal linking.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/no-follow-internal-links-2

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru

2. The more popular way to promote your website is to guest blog on other authority sites.  One, you get to spread your name and knowledge and two, you get a nice juicy nautral backlink from them.  I guess you can post on other sites with the same article to gain more visibility; however, you HAVE TO MAKE SURE that they use canonical tag pointing to your article so that Google will know that your article is the original article.  Well, Guest blog is the way to go.

[Robdob2013]

Hi,

Once again thank you..

Can I get some clarification:

-1-

HAVE TO MAKE SURE that they use canonical tag pointing to your article so that Google will know that your article is the original article.

I understand canonical to meaning http://www.mysite.com but what do you mean but tag pointing,  can you further elaborate please?

-2-

Can you suggest some names of some of these authority blog site to guest blog on?  Also would we need to write original articles for these sites as a guest blogger or could I just use the same one that I am writing for the blog.mysite.com weekly..

thanks in advance for the extended info..

[TommyTan]

Hi,

1. What I was trying to say is that it is not easy to contact the webmaster of certain websites to add the canonical tag to prove that you are the original author.  Therefore, if you are planning to do it, make sure you can reach the webmaster and they are willing to add the canonical tag.

2. Since I don't know which industry or niche you are in, it is hard to recommend authority blog sites to guest blog on.  What you can do is either 1) Google "Guest Blog + Industry/niche" or 2) Visit http://myblogguest.com/ and browse the forum to see what blogs are looking for guest authors.  It is free to create an accont and everyone in the community is nice.  If you ask people, I am sure a lot of people will refer you to that site to look for guest blogs.

Hope this helps!