When you write an article do you place unrelated links in the author’s bio area? For example, your article may be about writing, but the bio link you place does not go to a writing related page.

If you do place unrelated links, then you may find that your articles are not syndicated by others because you are straying from the relevance of the article. A very important rule of thumb is that you must keep your bio links pointing to content that is relevant to the article.

I see articles all the time that are written on a topic and then when I look at the bio link, I may find a link that points to the author. This is fine in some contexts, but those that syndicate articles are looking for links that connect the same topic.

Search engines strive to deliver relevant content for the user. As a writer, you should consider how your bio link is going to play into the ranking of the page. Another way to think of this is that articles with related bio links allows the website that is syndicating your content to get more bang for their buck…thus they are more likely to syndicate your article and you will gain more exposure for your work.

Give this some thought…think about your bio link and ensure that it points to content that is related to the content in your article. Good luck

Do you have trouble figuring out exactly what you need to write about and getting an appropriate title for your article? Here is a few suggestions that can help you find the right titles you need.

I highly recommend that you install Google Analytics into the web site you are promoting. Your hosting provider may be able to help you with this if you can’t do it yourself. Another helpful tool from the big G is their webmaster tools section. Both of these can become very handy in helping you see what you need to write.

The webmasters tools will provide you with a list of search results where your site appeared. This means that your site was presented to visitors and you will get a number that indicates where you appeared in that particular search query. This is not a real time statistic–it is merely a snapshot of a point in time.This is known as an impression in the tools area.

You should not be frustrated by the lack of real time data , and instead capitalize on the data that you been given. This is a great place to get your titles…some of the search queries listed will essentially be in the form of a title. Find the queries that will make good titles and write content that is relevant to your site and the title you choose.

Google Analytics is also a great place to get your titles and determine what your content needs to be. I use the keywords that are used to find my site and form titles from those. In some cases the keywords themselves will make excellent titles. In some cases you can take the scrambled keywords and create a grammatically correct title version for your article.

This tactic is actually using feedback that you have available to you to help you find good keyword rich titles and then create relevant content under those titles. You can also look at this data to see exactly what visitors are looking for and if you need to, you can create pages in your website that gives the visitor what they are looking for.

By optimizing to the keywords people are using and creating content that is useful to your visitors you will soon find that your web traffic is increasing. The best thing about this concept is that you are also narrowing down the search parameters and getting targeted visitors.

Another source of titles is to do some keyword research and see what keywords are popular for your particular web site. Once again, these keywords can form natural titles, or your can derive a usable title from the keyword phrases used.

To summarize…find out what keywords are popular for your site. Find out what keywords are getting impressions for your site, and finally find out what keywords are actually being used to find your site. Use this collected data to determine what titles to use and what your content needs to be. This is an ongoing process that allows you to create the optimum articles for marketing your site.

Articles tend to lose their ability to help your search engine rankings with time. This is called Link-Rot and occurs as newer articles push your article off to other pages.

One way to combat this is to edit the article and then resubmit it. I recommend that you do a complete rewrite of the article body and keep the new content consistent with the older title. You’ll want to keep the title if the URL of the article is search engine friendly…meaning that the title is used in the URL of the article once it is published.

Most article sites will take your newly refreshed edit and then display it right back on the main page. This tactic allows you to keep fresh content on the higher ranked home page. If you are able to keep the articles URL intact, then any links to that article on other sites will get indexed with the new content and can move them up in the rankings as well.

It is important that you actually edit the material and not simply resubmit an old article. Remember that search engines like fresh content and this tactic if done correctly will give them just that.

If you are tracking your submissions as I recommend then it is advisable to keep the date you submitted the article initially and then experiment with a time frame to go back and edit the article and refresh it.

There will not be a universal time as each article site will differ. This is where tracking your submissions will become important. Ideally, you should use a system that allows you to see how old the article is and allows you to help determine how often to refresh your content.

Like most endeavors, article writing can best be done via a system. Now, I already discussed my recommendation to use Google™ Documents as your word processor and the spreadsheet application is ideal for tracking your submissions.

I am big fan of manually submitting articles to individual article sites. Here’s something to consider before you start signing up for article site accounts. Be sure to pick a unique user name that will hopefully work for all your accounts. The username I use is unique enough that I have yet to find a duplicate user name on any of sites I work with.

Having one user name is just easier to work with. All my accounts use the same user name and email address (which is sometimes the user name BTW). This way I’m not struggling to remember different login info for dozens of article sites.

There is a distinct advantage to manually submitting as I have said before. Doing it this way, I can take advantage of setting up for revenue sharing if the site offers it…or if they offer it the future. I can go back and easily take advantage of the ad revenue sharing.

Another advantage with this system is that article site admins can contact me if they need to. Most automatic submission programs will submit your work under an unknown user name and will use the exact same email for every single article. The result, there is no way to contact the individual authors if there is a problem or if the site owner wants to let them know about new site features…such as adding revenue sharing.

So, before you set out signing up for article site accounts, remember to pick that unique user name and use it for all the sign ups.

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Writing and submitting to article directories will generate traffic to your site. The question that is hard to answer is exactly how long a particular site may help your rankings. Upon approval, your article is generally displayed on a higher ranked page on the article site. This is sometimes the home page where recent articles may be displayed. Unfortunately, as others add their articles, your article will be gradually pushed to another page which will likely have a lower page rank.

This shifting of the link back to your site causes your article to receive less of a boost from the site your writing is published on. Link-Rot is the term used to describe this gradual deterioration of the quality of your link. This deterioration occurs due to articles that are slowly pushed onto lower and lower ranked pages.

Some quality article sites will set a time frame to keep your articles. This means that they may delete your article once it reaches a point that it is considered to be stale and possibly not even indexed by the search engines. It is important to know that even high quality sites will be affected by Link-rot and over time your article will lose its effectiveness.

The way to combat this situation is to constantly keep fresh content submitted to the article site. Always make the newer articles unique and never try to resubmit your original article again. Please remember that while your article was active and ranked well, other sites may have picked it up and syndicated it. They may be newer sites that have not matured enough to be ranking well. With time, these syndicated articles may gain exposure to increased rankings on the maturing site…so your original article may gain new life via syndication on the other sites.

Keep writing original content and allow for the link-rot phenomenon and you should see continued success with your article marketing efforts.

Do you need a safe place to write your articles,books,etc. I recommend that you check out Google Documents. This is a free service that allows you to write and save your work in a variety of file formats.

I use Google Documents as my primary word processor and use the built in spreadsheet program to track my submissions. There are several advantages to using this system. First, I can access and work on my documents from any computer and download them in some of the most supported file formats out there today.

The word processing program has built in spell check as well as a word count feature. These are handy to have when you may need to watch the length of your articles. Another handy feature is a built in auto-save…your work is saved and can be sorted and stored in file folders.

I use the Google system to write my articles in and then transfer them to the article site. This helps to prevent the loss of my work if the browser session times out while I’m still working on the article. When this happens, you click the submit button and your work is lost if you are not still logged in. Trust me…It is far easier to write in the Google document center and then transfer your spell checked and edited article if need be.

I’ve done more than my fair share of writing into the article site’s text editor only to have my work lost due to the session timing out in the browser. I highly recommend that you do your writing in an area where it is auto saved and allows for editing before copying it into the article site. The copying process, usually just takes a few seconds and this is plenty of time to do a quick review and then submit.

Google Documents is a feature packed free system and can be found here: Google Documents

http://docs.google.com/

Most article sites allows the author to do some self promotion in the bio or resource area of an article. A quality article site will allow you to place HTML in this area. This is an important feature that is necessary to help you drive traffic to your web site.

Here are some tips:

1. Always hyperlink keyword related text if you have the option. If you are not familiar with how to do this, I will be offering a tutorial on how to do this a little later. TIP SUMMARY: Keyword rich anchor text helps your site ranking!
2. Make sure to place a plain text link to your site as well. This will have to be the “http://www.example.com/” format and may or may not not be hyper-linked in plain text article sites. Readers will need to copy and paste this into the location bar of their browser to view your info if the site doesn’t link it for you. TIP SUMMARY: Always allow for plain text rendering of your URL.
3. Always use consistent variations of your URL when linking anywhere that you can place a link. Search engines can treat two different versions of the URL as duplicate content. You can minimize this problem by always using the exact same form of your URL. For example: Don’t use “http://www.example.com/” and “http://example.com/” interchangeably. Both versions of the URL will work but they are considered to be two different pages by search engines and will dilute your page rank. TIP SUMMARY: Always keep URL versions consistent!

Here’s an example of an optimized bio entry for an article:

<begin example>

Kerry Thomas writes for Article Genius. Find out more about Article Genius here:

http://www.article-genius.com/about-us/

<end example>

Drag the mouse cursor along my example bio listing and you can see that I have used the anchor text “article Genius” to link to the About Us section of this site. Notice that I also placed a plain text version of the URL there as well. Some article sites may automatically hyperlink the URL, but if not then my readers will still have a way to visit my site.

Have you ever had an article rejected due to formatting problems. I’m referring to what is called hard line breaks. What are Hard line breaks? Basically you will encounter this problem if you hit enter before you get to the edge of your editing software. This causes an extra “enter” or forces the text to break to a new line.

The result is that this copy is hard to format in the article site’s text input areas. Some of the article sites doesn’t allow you to see this visually. You can sometimes look for jagged endings on your paragraphs. This is a situation where the text does not come all the way to the end and wrap around as it should. The result is a very ragged looking right margin and thus the extra line breaks that the article site is not set up to deal with.

Most editors will reject articles that have have hard line breaks due to the formatting problems that it causes them. There is a very simple tip that can help you avoid this problem. Keep typing…as you approach the edge if the text editor program you are using…Do not hit the “enter” key to force the text to the next line.

The text editor software will normally force the text to the next line automatically. This is known as a text-wrapping feature and guess what? No extra line breaks are created. So, remember that as you approach the right edge of the text input area, keep typing and let the software program worry about moving the text to the next line. By following this tip, you will actually decrease the rejections you are receiving due to the formatting problems.

While using this technique, you will notice that the right margin of your articles will look so much better and more professional. Give this tip a try, and enjoy your writing.

Kerry

Thanks for visiting this site! We offer the user a variety of article marketing tips and tools. You’ll be able to learn how to effectively promote your products/services via writing content rich web pages that the search engines will love.

Article Genius is a blog with a purpose…sharing the knowledge needed to help those new to the SEO/Article Marketing world. I’ll help you avoid costly mistakes and even help you learn how to find the perfect article directories to submit your work to.

I’m very proud of a new Firefox extension that I’ve developed that allows you to quickly evaluate an article site to see if it is user friendly. (More about the extension later, I promise.)

First things first…subscribe to the RSS feed from this site by clicking in the “coffee cup” above. You’ll automatically get all the posts here in your favorite reader.

Once again, Welcome to Article Genius.

Kerry