OK I own a site that is somewhat of an authority site in my niche and I have been writing articles recently about certain popular topics related to my niche and posting them on my site. These articles are normally indexed and begin ranking in the SERPs within about 48 hours (and ranking quite well - top 5 - 10 for their primary keyword phrases as well as secondary keyword pharses). Anyway I have written about 20 articles over the past two weeks and well as I have said they are ranking fairly well, top 5 - 10, but now I'm looking to try and push these rankings up the SERPs if possible and I was just wondering how I might go about doing that. Obviously with the data about the article's performance in the SERPs I have made some minor tweaks to the wording of the articles to improve keyword density and optimise for some more terms etc and I have the articles to a point where I'm quite happy with them, but now I'm looking to building a few more backlinks to each article and I was wondering what is the best way to go about building backlinks to these articles, without spamming up my site with these article links (plus a few off site links would probably be more beneficial anyway). I have read around the place that the best way to build backlinks to articles is submit them to article directories? Is this the case? If I do this should I edit the articles so they aren't the exact same as the articles on my sites and so they aren't so SEOed? Also does doing this have any ramifications for duplicate content penalties for my site and articles? Also obviously I'll need to add links within the article to have backlinks from the article submission, is there a standard format you need to do this in? Also do people recommend recruiting the services of someone to do the submission process for you? Also is there an issue with having the same anchor text for all your inbound links (I mean the article links will be the same for all articles so that might look suspect to Google when the same article and anchor text link is each of them)? I'm a complete newbie when it comes to this creating popular articles thing so all advice is appreciated. Also please if you have any other suggestions for improving positions within the SERPs for articles please let me know.
I'd just pick one place that is respected well and has a high page rank like Ezinearticles.com. Then, write articles that you will only submit to that site and not place on your own site.
I heard that if the article is indexed by Google on your site first then you won't receive the duplicate content penalties and it will just further promote your site as an authority site. Is this the case?
Something you should certainly consider is syndicating your articles via a RSS feed. If you submit this feed to the right sites, you can generate backlinks to each individual article, which may help with your rankings. By only including a summary or "teaser" in the RSS feed, you avoid duplicate penalties as well as bring traffic back to your site. I wrote a thread about it. Cryo.
Could I write individual summaries for each articles and submit it to each of those RSS feeds that you mentioned in your thread? How many backlinks could someone reasonably expect from doing something like this? Is this something that will defintiely improve your SERPs?
You can expect to get a handfull backlinks from each site you submit to, depending on how many items they choose to display. Some will only show a few, while others will show all of them. Squidoo lets you specify how many to show. More importantly, you'll get backlinks to specific articles, rather than just to you top-level domain. This means that individual articles will start accumulating their own PageRank, and thereby outrank any duplicate content. I can't guarentee that this technique will benfit you, I've only been doing it myself for a few weeks. But I believe that the theory is pretty sound. Cryo. _____ How To: Easy Deep Linking with RSS Feeds
You certainly should keep the articles used on your site unique. Write a different version to send to the article sites and add a link back to the article on your site at the end.
How unique should your original article be? Also how long and what sort of quality would an article need to be to be effective for when using these submission services?