“Free SEO Friday” audit for Marketing Plan Seminar

How can a local marketing consultant optimize her site to attract more customers and students for her marketing class? This is what I told her.

Normally on FREE SEO Friday at Kat & Mouse’s Facebook Page we do one free site audit, but today I’ve chosen two: Marketing Plan Retreats and Going Green Promos. (Notice how the winners also get an SEO-powerful, inbound link! 🙂

Why two? And why these two that seem so unrelated?

This is the third in a series of posts on article marketing.

In previous posts we’ve discussed the pros and cons of article marketing and then how to do article marketing for the most benefit. In this post we discuss where you should post your articles.

There are thousands and thousands of article directories now and if you read the post on the pros and cons of article marketing you’ll know why. Internet marketers, particularly affiliate marketers, are after link juice in any way, shape or form and love to submit to any and all article directories. That’s thousands of the same article spun and re-spun to thousands of article directories.

In a previous post I wrote about the pros and cons of article marketing. If you haven’t read that, I recommend you do so now. I mention some of the pitfalls of article marketing in general that you should be aware of. That article was written in 2010 and now guest blogging has taken over in popularity. Since both can be seen as tactics to manipulate Google, care is in order. If you’re gong to do it, do it for the right reason.

What to write

1. Save the really great stuff for your own site. You’ll get more inbound links to your own site that way. (You have to learn how to SEO and market though!) Put the great stuff out there in other sites and people will be linking there instead. See #5 in “How to write..” below for more info.

[2014 Addendum: Google came down hard on article marketing after this was written and guest blogging took its place as a way to manipulate rank. The two aren’t that different, but with guest blogging you have more control over where your post (article) will appear. Because of that, done right, guest blogging can associate you with the right crowd and do much to increase your authority and following in your field. But it too has been abused, and as of January, 2014, Google is pulling the plug on it as an SEO signal. To what degree we don’t know yet.]

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We all want those precious inbound links (also known as link juice) to boost our position in Google, but they are not easy to come by, particularly because most of the time we rely on others to link to us, and they might not be too interested in what we have to say. And so along came article marketing to the so-called rescue.

What is article marketing?

Article marketing is not new. For decades businesses have been using article marketing to their benefit as a form of advertisement. As an example, a landscaper might write an article on native plants and submit it to the local newspaper for printing just before the growing season. In exchange for the article, the newspaper would print the landscaper’s contact info along with the article. The arrangement is a win/win for both parties; the newspaper gets free content to publish to its subscribers and the landscaper gets exposure and gains credibility in the community.

[2014 Addendum: This was writtin in 2010, and many things have changed. Google lowered the boom on article marketing, for one, so don’t waste your time. Since 2010 guest blogging has taken over instead, but Google just lowered the boom on that as well. This doesn’t make this presentation irrelevant however.  There are still great ideas here for repurposing your content, and that’s what this post is really about.]

Everyone is trying to get to that number 1 spot in Google using every SEO trick in the book to get Google to love their website. They’re stuffing their keywords in, optimizing their urls, metatags and H1 tags, building silos, sticking it altogether with internal linking and more. Then they’re working off site with article marketing, social bookmarking, sharing, liking, tweeting, and link building.

For what? For one little bitty tiny bit of real estate on Google’s first place?

What if I told you that with even less effort you can command not just 1 place in Google, but ALL 10 spots? Would you call me a liar?

Well, I’m here to tell you it’s true. And over the coming weeks I’ll be telling you EXACTLY HOW to do it. But for now be content with some living proof it’s possible, and a brief introduction on how you can get started. Until I get it converted to HTML, here’s your pdf on “How to take over all 10 spots on Google’s first page.”

And, if you like it, don’t forget to share the love by pressing “Like, “Tweet,” “Share,” and whatever else suits your fancy.

[2014 Addendum – Things have changed since this was written in 2010. Google has come down on blog commenting so if there is any SEO value at all, it’s probably slim. But the advice here is still good. Do as I do and comment in other’s blogs to bring value to what they offer. You’ll build great SUPPORTIVE relationships that way. And you’ll get traffic and business if your comments are smart. I just got 2 new clients last week alone as a result, and one is on the other side of the blog.]

By far the number one thing you can do to increase your position in Google is to get inbound links. There are many ways to do this which I will cover in other blog posts here, but today I want to talk about blog commenting.

Scroll down to the bottom of this blog post and you’ll see a comment box. Not all blogs have these, but most do because most bloggers enjoy getting comments from their readers. Kat’s Meow is a new blog, so there are no comments here yet to see, but if you look at other blogs that have history, chances are you’ll see lots of comments. Notice too that quite often included with those comments is the author’s name and along with that a link to their website. Nice easy way to get a link to your site, isn’t it?