However, directory links show in your Alexa profile and if you are building an site that aims to be an expert site for its topic or a blog that you may later want to sell advertising on, then building up links of this type is a good strategy which will give you credentials if someone fast scans your Alexa profile. Adsense cannot compare for clicks in most cases with regular sponsored advertising from individuals.

There are however people who are totally snobby about advertising and intensively dislike it. When you are link building, having Adsense or any form of monetization on your site may hinder your efforts for the exchange of links with directories, serious bloggers and authority sites. However good your content is, having advertising aside of it, is akin to sacrilege.

Honestly, I am already tired of this mode of SEO and am almost ready to stop bothering with directories altogether. Like traffic exchanges they consume your time, want everything their own way and give you next to nothing – or nothing at all – in return. From other articles and posts I am currently reading – this method is on its last legs anyway.

Just a quick post here to offer you all a freebie, no sign up, just download it below. It will show you a way to do some high volume submissions of articles and help you understand the duplicate content problem and give you tools to overcome it.

http://www.richnicheblogging.com/freebie/DuplicateContent.zip

As I mentioned in the last post, the art of seo does not stop at getting the keywords right for your blog posts and articles, it’s also about getting links, and the best way to get links is by the submission of articles to groups and article directories etc.

This can be done by hand but it is also a slow and time consuming process. In fact if you do it by hand it may not even be the best way, probably forum marketing is better as a single post in a forum is much faster to write and no one is checking it for duplicate content.

If however you use an article submission service, then articles are better and the reason for this is because a well crafted article does it’s own job of promoting in it’s own right.

Article Marketing Gets You A Reputation As The Expert In Your Field

You have to earn that through repeated posting in forums, while only being credited with one link back.

When you first submit an article, you may be thinking – great – I have a folder full of private label articles, I can submit those and I’ll have 10 backlinks in no time.

Sorry to burst the balloon! You and every other man and his dog have already tried that! Article directories have software that checks the web for unique text, when they find, as they will, multiple instances of the same combinations of words as your PLR article, they will bounce you out of the submission area and politely inform you that the article has already been published.

This is the duplicate content obstacle that we all must overcome somehow. High rank article directories are stricter than lower ranking ones, some will accept your submission, some will not, but as a rule, article submission services will not even though they are going to submit it, exactly as it is, to lots of different places themselves.

How confusing ! However, one article sent through an article submission service can garner you a lot of links. So don’t ask why, just re write your PLR, or write an genuine original article and submit it using a service that will spread it around the internet for you.

When you have many sites to promote, and are organised, pay the subscription for a quarter or a year but if you only have one or two sites, or are simply starting out, choose the low cost or free option. When you are ready to sign up and pay for more exposure, get those articles ready before you sign up, not after, so you don’t make the mistake of just writing a few articles and then forgetting to do more so you don’t  get your moneys worth.

If you are paying for a few months, you should be thinking about submitting 5-10 articles a day, everyday, so look into ways to spin an article while you are at it.

The link above will allow you to download an ebook from my favourite article marketer submission service that will give you more information about duplicate content. With it are two pieces of useful software. One is a quick and easy formatting template to help you write a good article. The other is software that will compare two articles for difference, so you can enter your PLR article and your new article and check to find out where you need to make more changes so it doesn’t trigger the duplicate content alarm.

Here’s the link again, just save it to your desktop, no sign up, just click below

http://www.richnicheblogging.com/freebie/DuplicateContent.zip Enjoy.

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I won’t pretend to know for sure because I have this feeling that algorithms are similar to algebra and Although I wasn’t too bad at math with numbers, once you start adding the letters to the equations I quickly became lost. Luckily we don’t need to know much math to have an basic grasp of how to add 2 and 2 and reach 4.

Page rank is a Google ranking. To see if you have page rank, install the Google toolbar and in the centre is a bar similar to a progress bar. If there is some green on it, the site you are viewing has page rank. If you imagine the bar divided into 10 equal parts, you can estimate the page rank of a site.

No green means you have no page rank. The lowest page rank is one, many sites can fairly easily achieve a two and three is not so hard either. Four five and six get progressively harder to gain and to maintain, seven and eight are Olympic quality sites and I have never seen a perfect 10 – Google only gives itself an eight.

To gain a page rank of one is relatively easy so long as you write a page on something that hasn’t already been massively covered. A page about how to swing a golf club, how to make money online, or how to train a dog will be almost impossible to get rank for.

To get page rank a keyword suggestion tool is very helpful. You will enter a main topic and it will give you back a listing of recent searches that included your word. These are usually contained in a phrase called a key phrase. Golf and golf swing  might be considered topics, but “how to mend a golf club” would be a key phrase. The keywords “golf club” “how to” “mend” are all separate parts of the keyword phrase which can count towards your score for these words. But this page can rank on the phrase alone provided there are several searches a day for it and very few other articles using this exact phrase.

Search engines need a big hint about what you’d like from them, so use this phrase in the heading, subtitle, page title, several times in the subtext, as a category, in the meta information and in meta keywords as per the advice of articles on search engine optimization. If your page is rare, this alone may be enough for rank, if you can get it indexed. To be sure though, link to this page, using the phrase over the link from another site, preferably one with rank of it’s own and a related topic, but this is not essential. Two or three links should do it but you may need up to 10. To increase to a page rank of two, you need more links, maybe 20-100 or so, to get a page rank of three, 60-600.

I haven’t come close to four yet but I’m assuming that its over 600 and you’ll need to ask an expert how many more you need for higher ranks.

We call it page rank but the rank is applied to a site, each page on the site will carry the page rank bar with the same page rank. So to increase your page rank, you don’t have to stop at one page but can repeat this process with many different pages. As you do this, the actual single words are added up and ranked.

So you have managed a page rank for “how to mend a golf club”. Which part of that phrase do you want to be favoured for? If your site is a “how to ” site, then further articles should also be titled “how to …..”, if recycling is your thing, maybe it’s the word mend that is important to you, more likely is that you have a golf site and want to rank for golf and golf club. Writing new articles with these words in the seo places and linking to them with these words will score you a point for them which will eventually add up to page rank.

You will also start to build authority for your site regarding your main choice single words. This is actually more important than the visual ranking even though a little proof is good to see, but where you can have two key words come together that you have built some authority for, your pages will show for specific searches which include partial matches.

The more you increase the number of seo articles and the keyword links back to them, the better off you will be for free traffic, but of course only for the key words , and I do mean words, that have authority, articles without those words will not be favoured.

So choose about six words that really encapsulate what your niche site is about and use these in titles and for links as extensively and in as many different combinations that you can. I’m not an expert on this by any means, but, this has worked for me.

Links of course are gained by the hard slog of submissions. Comment on blogs and in forums, submit articles, submit your site to search engines and directories, and ask for link exchanges with reputable and ranked sites, the higher the better.

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