Writing Articles to Improve Positioning

I’ve been writing articles here for over 3 years. That’s over 300 articles I’ve published on the topic of search and its impact on our world.

And over that time I’ve watched our search engine referrals and visitor sessions climb each and every month to where we have almost 12 million page views on this site alone.

In fact, some of our top referring keywords come from articles. People found this site for “history of AOL” 104 times last month. And when you search for this phrase, you find our page ahead of AOL’s own history page!

And that, readers, is the power of a well written article.

Now you’re probably saying to yourself “yeah but does that generate leads?” Well not directly. While there are a few leads generated from that one time visit to the site on an article, but in general, the leads are more intangible.

I say intangible because what the articles have been doing for this site since early 1999 is building our brand. This site’s articles convey to the world that we know our stuff.

It’s done such a good job, in fact, that we’ve found our articles referenced in college papers, and even official course material. We’ve found professors of marketing and business in many areas around the world commonly referring to our articles as part of their knowledgebase.

We’ve had our articles quoted in various college papers from class projects to thesis work.

Not to mention that dozens of other trade websites pick up and reprint our articles verbatim, with links back to the source.

As you can imagine, the articles are not only promoting our brand, but also providing us a way to do natural link building. We don’t actively have to search out and request links because they occur on their own.

We write an article that catches someone’s eye and they blog about it or copy it and reference it with a link, or series of links. These links work kind of like a virtual word of mouth. Because then others who read that blog or other industry site also read our articles and remember them.

Perhaps they even blog about them or write about them for their own sites, linking back to either the site they read them on, or our site directly.

It is an almost endless cycle that continues to snowball. And that’s just the link popularity.

Article writing also naturally increases the sites size. So much so that when I started writing, the total page count in engines like Google was just around 600 pages. Now we’re pushing 1000 pages indexed.

I don’t think we’ve ever had an article removed or penalized, and yet they still drive traffic.

It’s gotten to the point that the crawlers visit our site many times per day, looking for new content. Googlebot visits an average of 6 times a day (down from over a dozen when we were pushing out content at a rate of one page per day) but it’s still a very frequent visit.

And the new pages show up in the index faster than “regular” web pages.

I’ve found my new articles in Google as quickly as the next day after it’s published. And generally they are ranking within 3 or 4 days.

The rankings are quite varied as well. We have top Google spots for stealth techniques in case you ever wanted to learn how to cloak your site. And out of almost 50 million results Google has determined that our article is the best one on website ownership

If you want to read the Yahoo mission statement you will also find this site ranked at or near the top.

Go figure, an SEO company ranking ahead of Yahoo! for their own mission statement.

The last point I want to make about articles and their use as an SEO technique involves feeds.

We added XML to our site when its use as a syndication tool was still relatively new. And since then we’ve been releasing our articles through this feed for some time now. It’s been so effective that the feed is our top requested file. And we did this without syndication (i.e. pinging blog sites) because at the time pings were not the norm.

Nope our syndication comes from those who see value in our articles and want to read them. The feed has been so successful WITHOUT this syndication that it gets requested about 2000 times per day.

That means that the last few articles that we post on this site are being seen at least 2000 times per day in addition to the page views the log files capture. In other words, our content is generating an additional 10,000 impressions per day that the logs aren’t catching.

How’s that for branding and building an online reputation?

Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Search Engine Positioning by Searchengineposition
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

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