Article printed from SEO-News: http://www.seo-news.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.seo-news.com/archives.html

SEO Content Distribution Linking For Newbies
By Joel Walsh (c) 2005

The new buzz on the internet is all about getting one-way links
by distributing content to other sites in exchange for
backlinks. As with every other SEO or website promotion
technique ever devised, there are plenty of newbie myths about
it that can ruin your chance for success before you even start.

Newbie Myth 1: The "Duplicate content penalty."

Some webmasters worry that if the content on their sites is
suddenly on hundreds of other sites, search engines will
inflict a "duplicate content penalty." Why is this concern
unjustified?

* If this were true, every major newspaper and news portal
  website would now be de-indexed from the search engines, since
  they all carry "duplicate content" from the news wires such as
  Reuters and the Associated Press.

* Thousands of self-promoting internet gurus have proven that
  distributing content is an effective method of improving search
  engine rank.

* Even more thousands of content websites have proven that
  republishing this content does not carry any search engine
  penalty.

True, the first website to publish an article often seems to be
favored by search engines, ranking higher for the same content
in searches than higher-PageRank pages with the same content.
But the "duplicate" pages do show up in the search engine
results, even if lower than the original site. Meanwhile, the
reprint content has no effect on the ranking of a site's other
pages.

The only duplicate content penalty is for duplication of
content across pages of a single website. Meanwhile, there is a
sort of "copyright theft" penalty, whereby someone who copies
content without permission can be manually removed from search
engine indexes out of respect for the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act. But that penalty is only for flagrant theft, not
minor mistakes in attributing reprint content.

Newbie Myth 2: The goal is to get in article clearinghouse
websites.

There are over 100 popular, high-traffic websites that act as
clearinghouses for content made available for redistribution.
These websites include isnare.com (http://www.isnare.com),
amazines.com (http://www.amazines.com), and goarticles.com
(http://www.goarticles.com).

Many novice content-distributors are upset when the article
clearinghouse websites, with tens of thousands of articles each
with a backlink, pass negligible PageRank. But the point of
distributing content to those websites is for other website
owners to find your content and put it on their websites--not
to get a backlink directly from the clearinghouse website
(though this is sometimes an unexpected bonus).

Plus, to maximize PageRank-passing links, you also have to
submit articles to website owners individually. It's not a
small amount of work. But there's no substitute for a polite,
individually crafted email recommending a website owner
complement his or her existing articles with one you've
written.

Myth 3: Any content will do.

Reality: It should be obvious that many website owners, jealous
of their link popularity, will only republish exceptionally high
- quality content. For articles, this means a unique point of
view and solid information that cannot be found just anywhere,
ideally presented in compelling language in a web-optimized
format by a professional published writer. You can conduct a
content distribution campaign with bad content, but you'll be
handicapping yourself from the start.

Myth 4: Distributing content is easy. Just hit "send."

Reality: Content distribution campaign requires skillful
planning to target publisher websites effectively.

This is essentially a four-step process.

1. You must identify the categories of websites most likely to
republish your articles. These categories range from the very
broad, such as internet, business, and family, and can go as
narrow as family-friendly internet businesses.

It's a careful balance: you need to make your target category
narrowly relevant to maximize the value of the link and your
chances of getting your article accepted for publication. But
if you target too narrow a category, you'll lower the maximum
number of links you can hope to get.

For instance, a website on web content writing has to target
its content distribution to more than just sites focusing on
web content. There are only so many websites devoted to web
content as a topic of interest, and besides, many such websites
would be competitors. Distribution should target broadly
relevant categories, such as web design, webmaster issues,
writing, marketing, business, website promotion, and SEO. Yet
some broadly related categories, such as internet or
publishing, are not relevant enough to yield good results.

2. To maximize success, you must have articles custom-created
for each major category you want to submit to. "Incorporating
Content in Web Design" and "Marketing with Content" would be
possible titles for a web content-writing website owner
targeting web design and marketing websites, respectively. An
article about web design won't appeal as strongly to marketers,
or vice versa, so simply submitting to websites having to do
with "the web" would not be as effective.

3. For maximum success, articles custom-written for a category
often have to be refined for sub-categories. For instance,
"Incorporating Content in Web Design" becomes "Incorporating
Content into Flash Web Design," or "Incorporating Content into
Accessible Web Design." Sometimes the refinement is just a
"find and replace" of one keyword for another, sometimes just
in the title. Sometimes, entire paragraphs have to be reworded or
removed.

4. Once you've identified sub-categories of websites, you still
have to be able to meet the requirements of individual websites.
Some sites only publish articles up to 500 words, some only do
how-to articles. Owners of high-ranking websites can afford to
be choosey. To really maximize results within a sub-category,
you need at least three different articles of varying lengths
and focus specifically geared toward that sub-category.

In the end, distributing content for website promotion and
inbound links is a marvelously effective way of promoting a
website. But it's not magic beans. Like anything else having to
do with achieving success on the web, it takes hard work and
knowledge to be successful.

================================================================
Joel Walsh is the owner of UpMarket Content, offering a fully
managed content distribution campaign guaranteed to get you at
least one hundred one-way inbound links for every three pages
of content: http://upmarketcontent.com/website-promotion-package.htm
================================================================

Copyright © 2005 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SEO-News is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.