Article Marketing - still valid if done right?

[Marcus_Miller]

Much of the work I do tends to be on a lot of small to medium sized company websites, the kind of businesses that do not have thousands of pounds to spend or the budgets to create reems of quality content.

That said, neither do the competition so one approach that has worked well in the past has been article marketing.

The approach would usually be to develop some relevant content for the site itself, even if that is just a range of service type landing pages or answers to relevant customer problems and then build links from the article marketing sites (primarily ezinearticles.com).

An average approach would be to write articles that are relevant to the individual services, for instance, problems that can be solved by the service and then to link these articles back to the service pages with the desired keywords in the anchor text.

Another approach has been to develop an article with the client that solves a common customer problem for their own site and then to write a few summarised versions of the article for the article marketing sites. Again, with the intention of gathering traffic, giving a basic answer and linking back to the main article with the main keywords we wish to rank this page for.

For smaller sites serving a fairly tight geographic area this approach, combined with submission to some quality directories (local and niche) has been a strong combo historically.

I know there is a lot of junk on the article marketing sites and there could be negative affects from posting loads of pointless articles but using them properly, to broaden the net, provide answers (albeit summarised) and generate links - is this still a valid approach post the Google Farmers update?

It may be interesting to see how the article sites like ezine have to tighten up the editorial process now and if the content becomes better across the board, it may possibly strengthen this approach over time.

Do any of you still use article marketing as part of your SEO campaigns? If so, what are your strategies and where do you use?

Would love to hear your thoughts folks.

Marcus

[Nemek]

It's actually a good question. I think there is a good chance that Google has capped the ability of sites like Ezine to rank, but not shut off their ability to pass link juice. They might not have though as much link juice to pass as they had previously.

[maxkennerly]

I don't have a particularly aggressive article marketing campaign, but I have thrown up (excuse the pun) a couple high quality articles which either addressed a common question or solved a common problem. I haven't a clue what they do specifically for SEO, though I imagine they still help a little bit because those of my competitors that do invest heavily in article marketing are still ranking quite high. I do know, however, that the articles themselves do get read and, astonishingly, people read those articles and then contact me about the same issue. I had exactly that happened last week; someone read my article on ezinearticles and then contacted me about it.

Thus, I think there's still some benefit to it, but you should do it in as much of a white hat manner as possible. I don't think there's much value in dozens and dozens of low quality articles, but I do think there's value in having a handful of decent articles up. Also, for what it's worth, it's my impression that this article sites are indexed almost immediately, and so their outbound links (i.e., your site) will be indexed almost immediately.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, that's exactly my approach and it always forms part of a larger picture but good quality articles can help get traffic to and rank a new site so it factors in still for me. Cheers! Marcus