Saturday, September 23, 2006

SEO - inbound links analysis over time

Nosmada asked the following question in the comments to my last post...

Hi Andy,
Glad you are back. I was researching article submission software and was wondering what you feel is the easiest and best way to get one-way links including other ideas like using blogomatix or other methods. Like what is the easiest thing that really produces when you are really time crunched?
I haven't been able to immediatey pick things back up where I left off, because it has taken some time in analysis of what I had been doing, and what continues to work. It has even meant that I haven't been able to get back in contact with everyone I should.

Easiset is relative to your situation. A lot also depends on whether you are trying to link for a number of major keywords, or thousands of low hanging fruit.

I still strongly believe in article submission as an effective way of promoting websites but you shouldn't use it as an exclusive method.

My belief is that Google has some kind of balance scale, and looks to see some kind of natural linking from different types of sites.

Links from articles will only get you so far, and you need links from other sources which balance it out to get a higher authority rating.

I still rate Article Marketer as the best way of submitting articles. They weren't a flash-in-the-pan. They are still in business, growing their distribution, and improving their service.
The bad news is that they are going to be putting their prices up "any day", so now isn't a good time to sit on the fence.

Looking at things based on what I remember 9 months ago, I see an aweful lot hasn't changed.

The PR of many popular sites also hasn't changed, despite continued and in many cases increased distribution of their content.

If all you are getting is links from PR0 to PR6 sites, it is going to be hard to get beyond PR4 to PR6 yourself.

So article marketing is going to help, but ultimately the best way to get a high rating and a huge variety of inbound links is to create a buzz about something that gets others talking and linking to you.

As an example I am going to be continuing work on my plugins site. It gained a PR5 rating almost overnight with very little promotion work.

I suppose the best example of the buzz effect is the original pixel adverts site. The higher up the internet food chain you create the buzz, the better quality links you will get.

Then again my plugins site doesn't make much money. That is something I will be working on, and obviously I want to increase the amount of links it is getting exponentially.

I haven't tested out any of the new mass blogging tools, but from what I have seen whilst they are going to help bring you traffic from low hanging fruit keywords, they are not, just like articles going to take you to "authority" status and beyond.

I respect many of the people using them, for instance Dane Morgan has been recommending various products over the last month and I respect his opinion.
Would you believe I also respect Bud Wiser over at Army of Blogs.

That doesn't mean I agree with everything they say, or that I would use every tool they use or give a testimonial for.

Actually Army of Blogs is quite a good example. I am sure Bud has spent a little time promoting his blog, and of course he has some links coming in from RSS feeds etc. Whist I am sure it is not his core business, I would still expect at least a few of his pages to have PR4 or higher. (yes I know PR isn't a major indicator, but it is an indicator)

This Blogger blog also currently is a good example of bad internal linking. I have PR4 on the front page, but it is not being passed onto important internal pages very well. I just spent 30 mins or so scrolling back to previous posts to see their PR, and the ones that had an article pointing to them are PR3.

Thus it is my opinion you will get PR3 for any site that you submit at least one article for, for the page it is linking to, as long as you submit it to the "majors" such as ezinearticles and it gets picked up on a fair number of other sites.
If you submit lots of articles, you might get up to PR4 or PR5.

To get any further than that, you need to be doing something else...



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