Sugarcaned

Articles are a great way to get some good inbound links to your website. There are hundreds of article repositories out there just waiting for you to add your content to them, and best of, the far majority of them are completely free.

Most only accept plain text so you cannot control your anchor text with some HTML or BBCode, so your links will look like: http://www.personaltravelgroup.com rather than Make Money at Home but it's still a link nonetheless.

So what do you write about? Remember how important relevancy is to SEO. There's little point submitting articles on pot plants if the site you're optimising is about dentistry. Pick a subject in your field and write 500 words. Put your link in a prominent position in the document. This atleast ticks a couple of our Good Anchor Text points: on a page with relevent content and few other outbound links.

Submitting

I'm not going to type out a long list of all the sites that you can upload your article to, many people have done that already - just do a search in Google and you'll find them. Now you can start uploading it: make an account at the site, some even allow you to make a profile, do so, and obviously put your link in there if you can.

It might help, if you're really serious about this, to use an automated submission program. There are several of these on the market and they can really speed up the process. You do of course get less control, these programs create your accounts automatically so they can't write little bios and put your homepage link somewhere. But you can always do that once the articles are online and you've got the time/inclination.

Duplicate Content

You may or may not have read about the ongoing debate about how Google deals with duplicate content. Google have stated in the past that they do not penalise duplicate content, but they won't index the same content more than once. This is a problem here - if we submit the same article to several hundred sites, and only 1 gets indexed, what about the backlinks? Do they get counted too? I'm thinking no, and certainly it's not worth risking hours and hours of work for one lousy backlink. Even if the links do get counted, it would be a shame to only have 1 copy of our article indexed. This could lose us potential traffic and exposure. So what can we do about it?

Enter Article Spinning

Article spinning is frankly a genius idea in my mind. It's so simple it's painful. You take your article, and where you have words that can be altered, you add variations. Then you feed your article into a spinner and it generates a random version of the article based on the variations you've suggested. You original copy might be:

Traveling to a foriegn country can be fun and exciting. Remember to be careful in the new surroundings and always keep emergency contact details with you.

You then add the variations of your choice:

Traveling {to|in} a {foreign country|foreign land|different country|unknown country} can be {fun|enjoyable|a hoot|the bomb} and {exciting|invigorating|electrifying|thrilling|stimulating}. Remember to {be careful|take care} in {the|these} new surroundings and always {keep|carry} emergency contact details {with you|on your person}.

The article spinner will then pick one of these suggestions at each part of your article and produce a unique version that is just different enough for Google to not realise they are the same document.

Clever, isn't it?

"Isn't this fooling Google?" I hear you cry. Well, to an extent it is. This goes against a lot of what I've preached in the past. And I'm sure it's something that Google will overcome in the future as their algorhythm gets more and more advanced. But really, I don't think that article spinning will necessarily lower the quality of the web. It's no different to sending out a press release, which more often than not will be replicated by many blogs in a similar fashion - editors often just change a word here and there to add their own stamp to your writing. I would really advise, nay, emplore you to make your articles interesting and content worthy. The better you make them, the more chance they have of being picked up by blogs, online or offline magazines and portals for inclusion and or research. If they're used, you might get your link included. Go for it, do it well and you should reap the rewards.

{happy|joyous|fab} {SEOing|Search Engine Optimising}!!