Snaring Links With iSnare

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 6:12 pm

Comments (2)

iSnare & Article Marketing

Send Your Articles to Hundreds of Sites With Just One Click On iSnare!

I'd like to point out to you a useful site called iSnare. The article distribution site iSnare enables you to submit one article to hundreds of article sites for a very low maximum cost of around $2 per article. If you purchase higher distribution credits from iSnare the amount of articles you can distribute increases and the price per article reduces.

Thousands of guides have been written on Article Marketing. There are as many strategies and ways to do it as there are trees in a forest. I'll answer a few questions you have below, I just wanted to introduce you to iSnare's article distribution service first.

Why Might You Want Do Article Marketing?

Sharing articles is a good way to get links back to your site and also an effective strategy to establish your expertise in your field. By publishing "helpful tip's" articles to specific sites, variously called article banks, article directories, ezines etc you gain in two major ways.

Your Signature - Name, URL and Anchor Text

A standard article has a title, a subtitle, a summary, the text of the article and what is generally called the signature. It is the signature area that gives you the most benefit. This is where you can declare yourself the author of the article, you can link back to your site with your site's url and you can enter anchor text for the url to target specific keywords.

If anchor text is the only html you ever learn, it's the most important piece to use.

This is an example signature - (minus the pic) - it's a like a very low key ad.

: Image via Wikipedia

The author of this article, Brad Pitt is a renowned actor and is often referred to as the sexiest male lead in movies. Read more about Brad Pitt by visiting...

Brad Pitt - Sexiest Man On the Planet

(The text above is fictional except for the sexy bit!)

Now visit the top article site online Ezine Articles and examine a few article author signatures. They are short and highly relevant and they almost all have a clickable hyperlink ( a blue link you click on to visit a website).

But they are not all web addresses with the http or www in front of a domain name, they are far more often relevant keywords that people are trying to rank for in search engine results. These keywords are called anchor text. Click on that link to visit wikipedia and it will give you the html code you need.

Establishing Your Expert Status

The second benefit of article marketing is fourfold.

A quality article shows people you "know what you are talking about".
A quality article acts as a signpost and directs traffic to your website.
A quality article on an high ranking site appears in search results.
A quality article can be republished on other people's websites

Did you notice that I am emphasizing "A Quality Article". This is because it's a complete waste of time to submit an article is that is not of high quality.

An unchanged PLR article will not be accepted for publication. A bad article can damage your reputation. A poor article will not be read right through to the signature. Articles that are not read don't stay indexed long and will not appear in search results or be republished.

So don't waste your time on article marketing unless you intend to submit original articles that do give helpful tips to establish your expertise.

Article Marketing & Duplicate Content Issue

Getting back to iSnare and article marketing there is one more issue to tackle. When multiple articles that are exactly the same are online, search engines "hide" some - you may have seen a link on Google for "similar results".

This has led to many discussions about the benefits of submitting the same article to multiple directories. It is certainly true that articles that are at least 30% unique are better but there are only so many hours in a day!

So far as I can gather the best strategy is to write 10 unique articles to start with. The best one should be on your site. Two should go to high rank article directories such as Ezine Articles or Go Articles and one perhaps to a site like Squidoo or Hubpages. The other six mass submit to an article distribution service such as iSnare.

That way you get the all the benefits. Your duplicate articles will still be read and republished and give you backlinks from article directories and that is why article marketing is so useful. So go check out iSnare...

Click To Send Your Quality Articles to Hundreds of Sites With iSnare!

Web Traffic Tips: Article Marketing (internetmarketingformommies.com)
Squidoo And Hub Pages: Two Forces To Be Dealth With (ronmedlin.com)
How to Accomplish Better SEO with Article Marketing (webmanmarketing.com)
How To Make Money Online Every Day Writing Articles (docstoc.com)

What is Web 2.0

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 12:54 pm

Comments (1)

What was Web 1.0 ?

The web's childhood when Google was a baby and Yahoo was the favoured search engine, the most interesting information was on education sites (and hard to access) and everyone was on dial up. The web was about documents and you didn't interact with it, so much as just read it.

What is Web 2.0 ?

Web 2.0 is essentially about bringing interactivity (such as that on a personal computer desktop) to the web. Web 2.0 describes the technological capability of internet browsers to allow people to enter data and view more complex information online.

Example are the ability to enter data into forms or text into blogs, social sites or support desks, by the internal site use of ftp technology in order to to upload media such as text, pictures and video.

It also refers to the streaming of video and audio and the playing of interactive games and the ability to comment on articles. It is related to the technology that enables anyone owning a computer with an internet connection to "almost" automatically use their browser to view or listen to this type of multi media. I say "almost" because there are still "prompts" that must sometimes be followed to download the applications that make this possible.

What Now!

What is Web 3.0 or Semantic Search?

Early search algorithms analysed pages, indexed occurrences of specific words and phrases and attempted to rate the importance of pages for specific search terms using this data and the number of links that referenced the page. The web is now so filled with data that this system is overloaded. Semantic search algorithms are now also checking the context of keywords to return more relevant results.

Search engines are constantly "tweaking" the algorithm to keep their searchers happy with quality results. It is getting harder and harder for websites to keep up with the information they need to optimize their site in order to appear in search engine result pages.

In simpler terms, search engines are now rating groupings of words to analyse the data they will index. This can have unexpected results - some good, some not.

Semantic search is specific. If you enter "boxer dog training" in Google - you will be offered sites that have "targeted" boxer dogs not necessarily all dogs "dog training" sites. The sites that appear are also not always single pages on boxer dogs but can be multiple page sites with related "dog training" words.

Semantically speaking, search is unlikely to display a search result titled "How do I train my dog not to eat my Boxer shorts?" now on this search result page as the other data on the page and site will show that it that it is not actually about Boxer dogs. Good news for searchers, not so good for site builders.

The web is global, so relevant local results are becoming more important to search engines. By using local directories and map applications then sites can "target" terms to appear for a topic - say "plumber" + their location area. Results for searches (if sufficient are available) will show less web sites in the US if you are in Australia. Use this to your advantage by including references to your local area and country.

Unless you start to optimize your site with some specific keywords and phrases and can show your site is relevant to this topic, the sheer number of competing sites will bury you.

Links from other web sites are also still extremely important.

Other things are also happening. In earlier years a page could stay relevant for a long period of time. The first page of Google is now starting to show blog articles published that day as results. Great! But it may be only 15 minutes of fame on the first page.

Unless the article is referenced by other sites and linked to, it will soon be replaced with the next days new publications.

Keeping up is hard. But not keeping up is quitting!