Vote for Your 0wn Website. Nobody Will Mind.
Author: Ron Hutton
Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton

OK boys and girls. Today we're having a pop quiz.

I heard that groan. Don't worry. This will be over in a matter of seconds.

Q1: "__________" is King.

Q2: Link "____________" and link "____________" matter oodles to Google.

The answers are provided in the following...

Are you hearing a lot of talk from marketers about writing and submitting artic|es to art:cle directories and other ezine publishers? I knew you were. There's been a glut of articles on writing articles. For good reason.

Now I haven't been actively writing and submitting articles until just recently, but the effects have been noticeable. So, what have I noticed?

In the last 4 weeks, I submitted three artic|es to a broad network of article directories and announcement groups. Yes, I did take one week off. So call me a slacker. The three article titles that I submitted were:

"How to Put Your Bookmark on Top Every Time."

"When a Customer Has Done Everything to Get Your Goat"

"We'll fix that later..."

I'm going to report the following numbers in real time as I'm writing this article. This relates to "Q2" above. You can do this too because I'll describe each step exactly. It's real simple.

1) Go to http://www.google.com 2) Type the exact article title for each of the following titles and put it inside of quotation marks. (The quotation marks force Google to look for the exact phrase.) 3) Click the "Google Search" button, and... 3) Be am@zed.

Google reports:

"How to Put Your Bookmark on Top Every Time" - Indexed on 5,820 pages

"When a Customer Has Done Everything to Get Your Goat" - Indexed on 62 pages

"We'll fix that later..." - Indexed on 554 pages

Now, am I going to tell you that in 3 weeks time I've managed to generate 6,436 inbound links to my website? Not. Submitting artic|es doesn't do those kinds of miracles, but my artic|es are definitely out there for other webmasters and ezine publishers to use.

Unique visitor count to GoThrive.com has double since starting my article submissions, and as the artic|es get picked up and published, the inbound links will continue to materialize with time. Not a bad investment of time since the entire process of writing the article and submitting it takes no more than one hour per week.

Inbound links pointing to your website are a very good thing to have. This is part 1 answer to question 2 above.

Link Popularity.

The second part of the answer to question 2 above is equally important. You see, it's not just how many inbound links are out there voting for your site, but it's also important that they're voting for the right thing.

Link Reputation.

Let's say you have a website that promotes running shoes, and you write an article on the wonderful benefits of odor eaters. When you write your article, you'll have the opportunity to include a resource box at the end of your article and this is where you can capitalize on your chance to build link reputation.

The idea behind "link reputation" is that the inbound links use Power Cheerleading Shoess in the text that match the theme of the page to which the link is pointing.

One more time nice and slow. I don't want you to miss this.

*** The idea behind "link reputation"... *** is that the inbound links use Power Cheerleading Shoess in the text *** that match the theme of the page *** to which the link is pointing.

This is a fundamental SEO principle that you should keep in mind not only when writing a resource box for an article, but also when you're designing your web pages.

So, to do this right, you'll want your odor eater article's resource box to have an odor eater Power Cheerleading Shoes-laden link pointing to an odor eater page on your running shoes website. Does that make sense?

As the article's author you're in the perfect position to get the second part of the linking equation just right.

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