Free or Very Cheap SEO Using Articles

If you're on a tight budget but want to rank a site for profitable keywords, SEO is still the top method. But how to get it for free or very cheap? This article gives away some useful tricks anyone can use that are surprisingly effective…

The first thing you need to realize when talking about current SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is that what worked a few years ago still works but it needs to be modified to comply with the guidelines of the search engine you're expecting to rank your site on. For most of us looking for the top traffic source, that's Google.

New SEO

OK, while there is a new methodology you must use if you want Google to like your site, some of the old methods are still as effective as they always were. The primary tactic here is getting backlinks to point at your main (or money making) website.

In the old days (pre-2012) you could unleash high numbers of these with relevant anchor text related to your keywords using software and your site would magically outrank everything else. Now you have to work a lot smarter to stay within Google's quality guidelines and that means no more spamming links!

Article Submission for Links

You can still submit articles to directories and article submission sites, each with a link to your money site but nowadays, those links should be non-committal and definitely not containing your keywords. In other words, the anchors need to be bare url, site name or brand, generic (such as "click here", "this site" etc).

This is to avoid falling afoul of the Penguin algorithm that counts links and their anchors and penalizes sites that go over a certain limit (which is unsurprisingly strict). You should also try to get links from sites that are relevant to the topic of your site if you can (although generic article directories are general but that's OK).

What this does is build a non-threatening link profile for your site that will not trip any red flags or cause any penalties. It's still a good idea to get the links slowly, like in a trickle rather than in a flood. But over time you can end up with hundreds or even thousands of these and you're site will only benefit from it.

Getting Good Links

Once you've built up a strong neutral link profile, you can start adding links with your keyword as the anchor. But do this very sparsely and don't use exactly the same anchor more than once or twice.

The idea is to stay under the radar and avoid any threat of a penalty now or in future updates to the search engine algorithm. In other words you build in future-proof authority for your site.

Where do you get such links? That's the problem many site-owners face and most end up paying thousands of dollars to SEO companies to get those links for them.

But you can do it yourself for zero monetary outlay (but at the cost of a fair amount of your time) if you want. Or very cheaply if you want to outsource some of the donkey work.

Here's how to do it for zero financial cost:

Getting Free Backlinks with Power

What you need is access to some websites that are both totally relevant to your money site and under your control. You can still do guest posting but there is a risk the owner of the blog night take down your link and keep the content you gave them for free.

But the best way is to use fairly web 2.0 properties you build yourself with a single decent article. You create a mini-site or mini-blog using one of the top web 2.0 sites like weebly, webs, wix, blogger, wordpress, tumblr etc with related keywords in the url (site name) and with a big long article that's right on topic for your site that is NOT rubbish (ie spun or very badly written gobbledegook).

You Must Be Prepared to Put In the Work

This is where you need to spend some time, but it pays off. You publish your article on your web 2.0 and put a keyword targeted anchor backlink in there.

Just include the one link to your site that you put first in the article. Near the end of the article, add a link to a related article on an authority site such as Wikipedia, a news site, government paper etc. Then publish, ping (I use ping-o-matic) and send some social shares from Facebook, Twitter, G+ etc.

Your web 2.0 will index pretty fast if you do all those things and your link will count for way more than hundreds of spammy links. That's how you do it for zero cost!

When your money site starts generating more income, you can use some of it to pay for outsourced articles and web 2.0 creation using fiverr or even go to the next level and start buying and hosting some of your own domains (see: davidmazer.com). But that's the topic for another article.

Directory Sites and Article Submission Pointers

Are you still submitting article to article submission sites and directories to improve off-site SEO? Well if you're not, you should be, because there is some value to doing it, as you will see when you read this article!

Submitting articles to article directories has been a mainstay of Internet marketers for many years as a means of link building and traffic generation for their websites. Recent changes to the way in which the major search rank sites has devalued the links coming from article submission sites, but there is still some value to doing high volume article submissions.

This article takes a look at the way in which article marketing still has its place in SEO strategies and in helping to improve the authority of sites, improving link anchor variation to better comply with certain algorithm constraints and also funneling traffic. If you're not using article submission to boost your own site's authority, you could be leaving a lot of free traffic and money on the table.

The Benefits of Article Submission to Directories

Using article submission sites and directories to submit articles to has been a long standing favorite method of boosting a website's authority, link profile and serp position. However, recent changes in Google's algorithm as well as the tightening up of the level of site quality that gets allowed to rank has greatly reduced the effectiveness of this strategy.

But that doesn't mean it has no place in a solid SEO strategy.

You can still use article submissions to send lots of varying anchors in links to a site in order to placate the Penguin algo updates. You can also use them to even out your balance of link anchors if you happen to be too heavy on certain keyword anchors.

Are You Using Article Submission for Your SEO Strategy?

You can use submitted articles in tiered structure linking strategies to send links to intermediary sites that themselves link to your main or money making sites. Or you can use them to send varied anchor links to web 2.0 properties such as free blogs etc.

This increases the authority of your intermediate sites which pass on that additional authority to your money sites without you worrying that the links are coming from poor relevance sites. Your intermediary sites act as a buffer so you're not directly sending so many links to your money generating site.

Using intermediary sites to soak up links from article submission sites and directories helps to reduce the number of physical links pointing at the site you want to rank in the SERPs without reducing the amount of link juice being passed to it. You get all the benefits without the potential for site penalization that you may suffer if you had all the links pointing at your main site.

So you see there is still a lot of mileage in using article submission to help rank sites in the SERPs. It just means you have to work a little smarter and not expect such rapid results as it used to.

Article Submission Instant Approval Sites and Quality Content

There will be times when you need to submit some articles that you want published right away and don't want to have to wait for an editor to come along and approve your article first. Luckily, there are some article submission sites that allow you to self publish without needing approval, thereby providing instant approval.

Of course, you can't abuse these sites by publishing garbage, or you'll soon lose your account and with it all your articles, so you need to exercise some common sense. That means at least publishing readable articles that have some usefulness to a potential real person should they come across it and decide to read it!

What is Quality Content?

When submitting an article to a submission site, it is common to use spun articles or those that are of low quality in terms of readability by a read person. While this is not what the search engines want to see in their index, its common practice nonetheless.

The chances are that search engines will not index really bad articles that are not readable by a human and their algorithms are getting ever better at spotting this kind of useless content. That means if you are relying on getting back-links to your site from articles that are of very poor quality, you may be wasting your time if they simply don't ever get indexed!

To get an article indexed and the link it contains counted by a search engine, you need to submit content that is of decent quality. By that I mean it has to be readable by a human at the very least.

Readable and Useful Content

But because search algorithms are getting so good at identifying what is and is not readable, the post is getting set higher and higher all the time. Eventually, your articles will not only need to be readable, but make good sense and be of value to a human reader in that they will gain something from spending their time reading it.

That something needs to be information, an answer to a question they were searching for (and found your article), or a solution to a problem for instance. It can be a recipe for a certain kind of cake or instructions on how to build something, fix something or buy something.

When you can produce decent quality in the content you create, chances are you are going to want to publish it on a website that you own, or as a guest post on a high traffic blog that will be of greater benefit to you than a low traffic article directory can provide.

The choice is yours!

What Are Article Submission Sites?

People who need to find article directories and submission sites can read this and discover a fantastic resource that will help them increase the exposure of their articles.

The idea with these types of sites is to provide people with a valuable resource of sites that accept article submissions. This is so article marketers can widen the exposure of their writing skills and help them to promote their own websites and blogs through the process of showing off their wares and examples of how well they can write.

Now, it could be argued that these types of sites are only there for helping people to create links back to their sites for search engine optimization purposes. Well, that's true up to a point, but the honest writers out there are not interested in any of that and will use this resource purely as a means to get their written works out there to a wider audience.

So to anyone who values a great resource, this type of site has been created to provide it. Its up to the user how they use it, but I'm sure that the honest writer with integrity and a sense of fair play will use it the right way.

Submitting Articles to Sites that Accept Them

If you're not sure what this kind of site actually, allow me to spend a little time in explaining it to you. After all, you don't want to start writing a bunch of great articles and blindly submit them to a bunch of sites without knowing what it is that you are doing, right?

Sites that accept your articles are essentially content directories that allow you to publish your own work and then they feature it on the site. Different sites have different rules about the level of quality the are prepared to accept, so it pays to read through their terms and rules before submitting your work.

What Do Article Submission Websites Look Like?

Some sites have live editors that screen submitted work to make sure it passes their own criteria for quality and usefulness and doesn't break their TOS by containing banned topics or those they deem unsuitable for their site. Others have less stringent rules while others still will accept just about anything, with several sites having no pre-approval setup allowing you to literally post whatever you want.

The sites that fall into the last category are usually abused by spammers, so you probably want to avoid sites that look like they are just full of garbage. The reason for this is that whatever you link to from really bad sites run the risk of being penalized by Google.

This is is ever more risky since Google is constantly improving its algorithm that sniffs out nefarious practices by website owners and optimizers. Bottom line is if you use really bad sites to get links, you risk your own sites they link to.  

How Does The Submission Process Work?

Again, different sites will have different rules regarding submission of your work. But generally, they will require you to first create an account with them, which may or may not need administration verification before you will be permitted to submit any work.

Once you have been accepted, you can then start submitting work. This will typically require you to submit a title, a short paragraph describing the article, a main body containing 400 words or more, a bio box with your details and a link to your site and some evidence you are a real person like a real email address or contact details.

Some instant approval article submission sites allow you to create an account and start posting your articles right away, often in familiar Wordpress format. See individual sites for their idiosyncrasies to ensure you get things right and have your work published without any hitches.

Using Article Directories Sensibly

People who are involved in article marketing can read this and discover there is a great resource available right here to help them submit to article sites and reap the benefits of the additional exposure. Of course, there are right ways and wrong ways to do anything and this post looks at these and how you can benefit from article submission sites even in these days of strict SEO limitations placed on all link building strategies by Google.

The first thing you need to understand is that you can't go blasting out tons of spun articles full of links to you money sites any more. You will ultimately end up doing more harm to your site as a result because it will get caught up in the algo for getting too many low quality links and be penalized in the serps. Obviously this is something you want to avoid at all costs.

There is a smarter way to work and make the best use of article directories and submission sites and you can take one or both of two options.

1. Write quality content and submit single articles with a single link back to you money site to quality article sites and make sure there are no duplicates anywhere. Make sure the article is highly relevant to the site you are linking to and don't use the exact keyword anchor that you are trying to rank for. Make it look natural and don't do too many of them, varying the anchor and including some naked urls in the mix and you will be ok.

2. Carry on with spun garbage but don't point any of the links to your money site. Instead, create a set of second tier sites that are fairly decent quality and highly relevant that link to your main site. Then use article directory submissions to link to these tier 2 sites. That way you pass the link juice through them to the main site. Second tier sites act like a buffer for any serp penalties that are handed out for unusual linking, while still passing the link power through themselves to pass higher authority, quality links to your main site.

Either method is workable, although the second one can actually bring better ranking results as your main site is protected from any low quality links. How you decide to play it is of course up to you, but this post is really just a primer to give you options that you may have thought no longer existed for this kind of search engine optimnization practice.