Article marketing isn’t about to go away. You probably knew that, but what you might not know is why this form of “getting the word out” still works.

Marketing Expertise

I consider myself an expert of sorts in article marketing. Beginning in 2005, I was hired by a client to write articles for his business and post those articles to various marketing directories, but especially to EzineArticles. “Ezine” is owned by Christopher Knight and if there is any one person who knows article marketing better than Knight, then I haven’t met him. Come to think of it I haven’t met Knight either. Moving on….

Seven years later, I have scads of articles posted to directories. At one point I was No. 10 on EzineArticles’ list, but eventually I shifted my sites to magazines, blogs and websites. Yes, I was paid to write for the directories and to post those articles. Maybe I should change my tense here because I still market articles on a regular basis. These days I write about a dozen articles each month for EzineArticles and other sites for my clients.

I thought article marketing would eventually fade away, but at this point in the game, I still see benefit from having original and interesting articles posted to other sites and picked up, with backlinks intact and posted elsewhere.

Article Marketing

Here is why article marketing will continue to thrive over the next few years:

1. It is free content — Even if an article is eventually posted to multiple sites, the people who are doing the posting are getting free content. Sure, you NEVER want to rely exclusively on content used available for use elsewhere, but with article directories you can find some good reads to include on your site. In exchange, you’re expected to keep the links in the “author’s resource” section in place.

2. Authors can build a name for themselves — If everyone knows who you are, then article marketing won’t matter to you. For people who want to make a name for themselves or desire to expand their base, then writing several quality articles and offering these to the directories makes sense. The alternative is to find a website to host these articles, but that doesn’t always work out. Besides, if you want multiple backlinks, then article marketing is the fastest way to gain these.

3. You don’t have to be a writer — Writing for the article directories is one way people who aren’t especially good at writing can hone their skills. Of course, that means some of the articles submitted to and accepted by the directories aren’t first-rate. Still, if you are looking for an audience and can’t afford the services of a copywriter, then the article submission route is a very good way to go.

4. Your article stays in place always — This is where you need to be careful about submitting your articles. Use a directory that isn’t proven or regularly updated and you’ll risk that your article will someday disappear. Personally, I don’t count who picks up my articles and where they get republished — I’m satisfied that the article directory has a copy and that copy will continue to send links back to my sites or my customers’ sites for years to come. Choose only an established directory and avoid those with little to no standards.

5. You’ll get new business — As a writer, I know my articles have brought in new business for me. As for my clients, they’re satisfied on two fronts: 1) backlinks are gradually built up and, 2) more customers find their websites. What they pay for my services is a cost they’ll need to recoup. I’m confident that my services are a moneymaker for them, otherwise why am I still doing article marketing?

Final Thoughts

One bit of advice that should be used is this: when you market your articles, submit what you write to just one directory. Multiple submits are a waste of time — find a directory or two or three that you like and send your articles there. Keep track of your articles including how many times each article is picked up and redistributed. Work on writing catchy titles, use your keywords wisely and put in place your sub-heads too.

I’m one of those who pretends he doesn’t care about PageRank, but in reality I do. Back in 2005, when I launched by “The Article Writer” website, it quickly zoomed to PR6. I never could figure out why it jumped so high, but eventually it fell back, dropping to PR2 or PR3 before returning to PR4 more than a year ago, the number where it remains today.

Up, Down or Unchanged

I manage several websites and immediately visited those sites including ones owned by clients. Beginning with this website, I noticed a drop from PR4 to PR3, but I believe that ranking to be largely deserved — I neglected the site from mid-February to late June, going with guest posts only when I posted at all. Personally, I would have spanked the site harder and knocked it down another notch.

My main automotive website at autotrends.org is now ranked PR4, which is up one notch while wordjourney.com is also up a spot and is now ranked at PR3, where it was more than a year ago. Most other sites stayed the same, although I must inform a customer that one of his sites, which was ranked PR4 last year and then fell to PR2, is now ranked at PR0. I’m not certain why, but I think there is an ad issue that could be causing a problem. Hmmm….

Search Engine Optimization

Regardless of whether PageRank were to officially be killed off or not, there are some things you can do to optimize your website. For my two sites which increased in rank, I will tell you that I worked hard to write articles that people have linked to, including detailed book reviews, product reviews and news items. I didn’t take those steps to help improve PageRank, rather to increase each site’s visibility and strength online. I write with my readers in mind, which is the best way to get acknowledged for what you do. SEO is grand, but readers won’t bother with your site if what you write is poorly written, boring or both.

Another method I took advantage of is to send updates to Facebook and Twitter for my busiest websites. I just started doing that for this website, so I fully expect that I’ll be at PR9 real soon. Just kidding.

Funny, I should have known that something was up when I started to get a rash of link exchange requests for my “Auto Trends Magazine” website earlier this week. As before, I’m not into link exchanges, preferring to call out worthy content naturally as part of links within an article or at the end of each article in a “Resources” or “References” section.

Most web owners leave it up to their selected SEO specialists and staff to do the dirty work on their online marketing campaigns, and while there are undeniably some great SEO companies that meet and exceed expectations, if a website owner knows little or nothing about SEO it can make them fall victim to below-par performance or even price-gauging (think your local mechanic!). Indeed, there are many firms that claim to be “the best” despite their limited experience in their field. In some cases, you’d be better off doing the tasks yourself.

Outsourcing SEO has worked for countless companies. In most cases, however, the results should be measurable. It is important to see the progress of your SEO work, whether outsourced or in-house, on a weekly or monthly basis (once trust has been established). In this regard, we have compiled a list of tools that will help you conduct SEO analysis on regular basis.

1. SEO Quake – A highly rated tool in the industry, SEO Quake delivers accurate information on your browser. There are several versions of this but it is recommended for use mostly as a toolbar. That way, you’ll immediately see a rough overview of all the websites you visit. Among the data displayed are Alexa rankings, backlinks, domain age, and Page Rank. The SEO Quake Toolbar is fast, useful, and free.

2. Reaction Engine – This tool is favored by both beginners and professionals because it is easy to use and provides comprehensive information. Ineed, it can make SEO analysis very simple. All you need to do is copy the URL of the website you want to analyze into the search box and data is generated within seconds; the report lets you know the website’s performance in terms of Content, Search Engines, and Troubleshooting, among others.

2. SEO Toolbar – This tool is much the same as SEO Quake. The SEO Toolbar lets you see the competitive landscape of your industry. This tool is valued at $300 although you can get it free when you sign up on the SEOBook website.

4. Alexa – Probably the grandfather of SEO analysis, Alexa rankings is widely used to determine a site’s overall position on the World Wide Web. It is still used as a basis by many SEO professionals and large corporations because of historical preference.

The list of programs outlined above is not designed to help you evaluate the overall effectiveness of your SEO efforts. On the other hand, it will let you know whether to retain or terminate the services of certain optimization firms based on the results generated. Take note that the tools here alone won’t tell you which strategy should be pursued. That can only be done in combination with market study, keyword research, and competitive analysis only.

Author Information

Mike Enson has been a professional search engine marketer for four years. He currently works for Premiere Tree Services of Mobile, AL.

Yes, I make my living through full-time writing. The pay varies as do the projects, but I’ve managed to come up with a good balance of customers, people I can count on to pay me on time. Okay, except for the one soon-to-be former client who still owes me money, but is in the process of making amends in the face of escalating payment requests from me. Ahem!

That’s another story.

What I want to share with you today is a formula for good writing that works well for me. I use it consistently on websites I own or manage and provide a similar style for my clients.

Brief, Catchy Headlines – The character limit for headlines is 80, with the optimal being 60. I prefer to write them in 40 characters or less. This headline is 36 characters and gets straight to the point. My keywords here are “better articles” which I stuck in at the end. In this article’s case I’m not concerned about  optimization (SEO), but generally that is a top concern when I am writing.

Photos, Please – I cannot remember the last time I wrote an article for online consumption that did not include a photograph. Pictures serve as eye candy and I like to include one with each article. More, if the article is about a special product such as a new car. Some photos get captions, other do not such as the one I’m using with this article.

One, Three/Four, One — Every article I write includes an introduction, three to four main paragraphs or more and a concluding paragraph. I’ve seen many people post article without a conclusion, but I’m old school — I like to wrap things up nicely.

Resources and References – Even if I’m not writing for an academic or news source, I will include one or more resources and will always reference whomever I cite. That’s just good practice and is appreciated by my readers who trust me to be thorough and offer attribution. On this site I don’t do that as much because I’m conveying personal (expert) opinion.

There are variations in my personal rules with my styles adjusted to suit the customer or align with my mood. In any case, writing is rarely a struggle for me as long as I’m interested in the subject matter and desiring to convey my thoughts for all the world to see.

Most SEOs realise that by and large the distribution of power on the web is dictated by links. In very crude terms, the more links you have and the more powerful the sites are that link to you, the more credibility you will have in the search engines’ eyes, and the better your chances of ranking are – that’s pretty basic SEO.

What is not so simple however is how the age of a link affects the power it yields, and whether you need to keep building links to a site in order to maintain power and rankings? Well, here are a few points to consider:

Domain Age

As with most things in the world of SEO, there is divided opinion on whether the age of a domain has an influence on how much authority it is given by search engines. I think this is a really good post on the subject and without getting into this difficult argument too much, my experience tells me that domain age does matter. If you subscribe to the idea that domain age is an algorithm factor, then if you think about it, link age must be as well. If a domain increases in power over time, then by definition so do the links that are contained on that domain. So I think it is reasonable to suggest that old links pointing to your site increase in power rather than decrease.

Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)

We know that with the arrival of social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which allow users to search for up to the minute information among their peers, search engines have been pushing to provide more ‘real-time’  and ‘fresh’ results in their SERPS. This spawned the term “Query Deserves Freshness” which basically means that in Google’s ranking algorithm, the ‘freshness’ of a result is taken into consideration (for certain search terms).

As fresh content tends to generate fresh links, there is a clear argument here that you cannot necessarily rely on old links to provide rankings, no matter how widespread or powerful they are.

Using simple logic, if people are not currently linking to content, it’s unlikely that it’s very popular at that time, and probably not what they want to see in search results.  I often see on my surf clothing site for example that the newest pages with the freshest links often outrank my older pages, despite them having a much larger back link profile.

Competition

Lastly, and probably most importantly, competition often forces us to continue our link building activities indefinitely. There is a great expression about link building that states all you need to do to beat your competition in the SERPS is to “match and exceed”. If you can investigate the back link profile of your competition, gain the links they have for your site as well, and then exceed what they have, chances are you will outrank them.  This logic is what drives link build efforts forward and means that you must continue to garner links to your site to prevent being overtaken by the competition.
So in conclusion, old links may get more powerful over time, but if you don’t continue your link building campaigns, you’re likely to get left behind.

Author Information

Duncan Heath is an SEO engineer and Internet marketing expert with over 5 years experience. He runs his own extreme sports site that compares everything from surfboards to flip flops. You can follow his business on Twitter.

The Internet is a touchy place. The slightest mishap, though well-intentioned, can leave a user looking ignorant, unsavvy and at worst a shameless self-promoter in an atmosphere that is all about community. Bloggers exist in maybe one of the most fickle areas of the online world and so must respect basic etiquette to go about building — and maintaining — their readerships the right way.

The following are some basic blogger etiquette fundamentals to help you avoid common mistakes and put your best foot forward in the blogging community.

• Write good comments on other blogs’ posts. One of the best ways to expand readership is to comment on other, more established blogs’ posts. Comments are a good way to direct readers from a similar, but already loyal fanbase to your blog and to cement your place as new, needed, expert voice in a given field. Don’t just mindlessly praise or deride a post, instead thoughtfully respond and build on an argument, pointing out strengths and going from there. Or, you can politely, but critically exposing weaknesses and offer a second opinion. Many blogs allow commenters to leave a web address and here you should put your blog’s address. Absolutely do not use comments to shamelessly self-promote. It will make the bloggers lose respect for you, your work, and will make fellow commenters see you as a self-centered spammer.

• Keep an up-to-date blogroll. Blogrolls serve two purposes: to direct your readers to like-minded blogs and to let those blogs know you appreciate their work and hope they will return their favor, which will direct their readers to your site. Blogrolls should be well thought out, with blogs chosen specifically for their quality and relevance rather than simply to get a link back from a bigger site. Blogrolls should also be up-to-date. Remove any dead links on a regular basis, showing that you care about the information presented on your site. Be on the lookout for new blogs to welcome into the discussion. This will also help establish you as an expert in your field and a member of a community not just looking for personal glory, which will inspire more goodwill — and more link backs.

• Always cite your sources. Plagiarism and any accusation of it will immediately destroy all your credibility and get you booted out of the blogging community. It will make you look unprofessional and untrustworthy. Remove all doubt by citing your sources, generally through hyperlinks. Doing so will make your blog look trustworthy and professional — on the level of traditional journalism — and will also portray you as someone continuously looking for new information to share (and critically examining that information). If it’s from a fellow blog, even better, as it only underscores your role as an active member of the blogging community. This also goes for photo credits: make sure to cite where you obtained photos not taken by you or a friend.

• Use Facebook and Twitter as networking tools. Networking, not promotion. Have conversations with people, particularly other bloggers, readers, or the musicians/athletes/entertainers/politicians/etc., being profiled in your blog. Oftentimes, the people you are profiling will want to read what you’re saying about them, so don’t be afraid to @ them. If you get a retweet that will direct a lot of traffic your way given the subject’s seal of approval. That said, have conversations, and do not just promote your work (this is more so for Twitter than Facebook). Social media experts say tweeters should write 10-15 “conversation” tweets before every one that promotes a personal endeavor. However, do not just talk about your cat or the weather — make tweets pointed, where you add to a discussion or promote others’ work or endeavors that you find relevant and of note. Again, it’s all about being a member of a community and not an island.

• Write personal e-mails. When asking another blogger for a link back or to take a look at your work, always write a personal e-mail. Do not send out mass emails. You are asking someone to take the time to review your blog — show equal effort in writing a personal email — even compliment them on a recent post you liked or why you are seeking out their approval/link back in the first place. It will go a long way to helping you establish a mutually beneficial relationship.

Author Information

Joseph Gustav is a guest blogger for Pounding the Pavement and a writer on the subject of electrician school for the Guide to Career Education.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a hot topic these days. It seems every time you turn around someone is talking about SEO and how it is essential for any company that wants to make a go of it in today’s business world. But what exactly is SEO? And does your business really need it?

Well, SEO is a marketing strategy that is intended to give you a stronger, larger web presence. And with consumers turning to the internet more and more for their product and service needs, SEO is, indeed, a key part of finding new customers and increasing the visibility and profitability of your business.

Site Optimization

Optimizing your web presence can only be a positive thing. After all, how can people know how amazing your company is if they can’t find you? When looking for a product or service people are more apt to turn to the Internet, particularly the search engines than the yellow pages. If you have a poor ranking and a minimal web presence, then potential customers won’t be able to find you online. And that can mean lost sales.

You may think that only large business need and can afford to utilize SEO as part of their marketing strategy, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, a smaller business can sometimes benefit even more than larger companies who may already have a solid web presence.

SEO Strategy

While both large and small companies can benefit from SEO, there is a difference in how it is applied to each. Other things besides business size that need to be taken into consideration when developing an SEO strategy is whether or not your company is local or global and if you deal with products or services.

It goes without saying that a larger company will have more money available for marketing and therefore more money that can be allocated for SEO. On the flip side, larger companies will need a larger SEO strategy in order for it to work.

Larger companies will most likely also already have an established web presence with a high traffic website. Their SEO strategy therefore should be geared towards tweaking the existing website and making it more efficient in drawing traffic by implementing more and better keywords in product and service descriptions, emphasizing competitive pricing and delivery service.

Small Businesses

Smaller businesses may have newer or smaller websites and not as high a volume of traffic as larger companies. While keyword placement can help to direct traffic to the site, a much better option is to use link building in order to increase the website’s ranking and direct traffic.

Increasing your online visibility will help increase your sales and put your business on the map, even if you are a local company without global aspirations. Local people turn to the Internet for their information also. The proper linking and keyword use will put you on top of the game.

Link Building

If your company’s website is new, link building is essential regardless of the size of your company. You want to make sure that you are listed when people search for your product or service on a search engine. And, in order to be recognized and indexed you need to use link building.

The right link building will also ensure that your website is high up in the search results. The higher you are ranked, the more people will be able to find you. Think about it: when you search for something online, how often to you click past the first page of results? Not very often.

Your Strategy

SEO doesn’t just benefit the big chain companies. Smaller companies can also get use out of SEO. The key is to make sure that the SEO strategy is personalized and geared towards your business whether you are selling a product or providing a service.

Author Information

Kara Taylor is an experienced blogger and a specialist in SEO, social media and website content. She uses her knowledge to give expert advice on a variety of topics on a Q&A site. When she is not blogging, she loves to learn new recipes and cook for her family.

Photo Credit: Sachin Ghodke

1. “I Don’t Know”

Let me just caveat this straight away and say that telling your client “I don’t know” is not a bad thing to do. It becomes very bad, however, when you use this phase in isolation and don’t follow it up with anything helpful. SEO clients tend to believe that you should know anything and everything about websites, the Internet and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Whether they expect more of their consultants than in other industries…I can’t say…but it sure feels like it sometimes.

When you are asked an SEO question that you don’t know the answer to, you should of course not try to wing it and make out like you do. This technique usually has two different variations:

1.)    Make out like the client is an idiot for not knowing the answer themselves as it’s so obvious, and shame them into never asking again.

2.)    Start talking gobbledygook about CSS, viewstate, algorithms and noindex commands until the client loses the will to live and moves on.

The best thing to do is admit that you’re unsure of the answer but you will find out for them and let them know as soon as you can. This will not only let them know you are honest, but that you want to help and you know how to find the answer. What more could a client want?

2. “That’s Just Google”

Most SEOs know that Google is heavily relied upon to provide traffic, often more heavily than is comfortable to be honest. Unfortunately, due to Google’s dominant market share we have to play the game and hedge our bets by focusing a lot of our time optimising for this search engine.

Whilst the Big G can be the provider great wealth, it can also take this away in a fell swoop with one or more changes to its algorithm. Largely speaking, if you play by the rules you should be okay, but we’ve all experienced in the past some drops in rankings or traffic that have come as a surprise and need investigating.

When this happens, possibly the worst (and most patronising) thing you can say to a client is “that’s just Google, sometimes it does that”. This is not helpful in the least and does not instill confidence in the client. They know that every effect has a cause, and if you don’t understand the cause then you will not be able to alter the effect. If you don’t know the answer, offer some possible solutions, but again tell the client that you will research the problem, get to the bottom of it, and work to put it right.

3. “But look at the traffic!”

Believe it or not clients aren’t interested in rankings. They’re not interested in links, and they aren’t even interested in traffic. So what are they interested in?

…Money…

A client pays you to do a job and they expect that job to provide more money to them in return. It’s very simple, and yet lots of SEO’s forget this, instead getting hung up on ranking number 1 for a big term or delivering 100 percent more traffic each month. If you are not making your clients a positive return on investment (ROI), there are no metrics in the world you can throw at them that will make them happy.

Author Information

Duncan Heath is a marketing expert working for a Tanda client, who specialises in offering solicitar credito (loan applications) in Mexico. He writes about all things web and client management.

I recently had an idea about using popular YouTube videos to help inform your domain name choices, and thought I would share it here.

Many people set up blogs not to sell anything in particular, but instead to build powerful sites over time that they can sell advertising on, sell guest posts from or dare I say it…sell links from. When setting up these sorts of sites, not a lot of attention is given to domain names. Most people go for something that sounds “cool” or is otherwise a generic phase such as “everythingandalways.com”. However if you thought carefully about domain choice, you could kick off your site’s traffic and link building efforts with much greater ease.

Popular YouTube

The first thing to do is search on YouTube for very popular (or better yet famous) videos. You can do this by sorting all the videos by “most viewed” and setting the time scale to “all time”. Here are some examples: evolution of dance, tootin bathtub baby cousins, the gummy bear song.

Next, you should check out the competition for the terms in the SERPS and also the suggested search volumes in Google Adwords Tool (yes we all know it’s flawed but it’s a good indicator). You’ll notice that the official site for Judson Laipply appears top of the SERPS (under the video results) when you search for “Evolution of Dance”. It’s also worth noting that this site is a PR5 site and has backlinks from Wikipedia, PCWorld and Wired.com.

Popular Terms

With this in mind it might not be worth going after the “evolution of dance” term, but it does show just how popular a site like this can become. If you hunt around the terms related to the other videos above however, you’ll notice there is very little competition in the SERPS, and certainly no optimised URLs. Just doing a quick check, I can see that domains such as tootinbathtubbabies.com and gummy-bear-song.com are available to buy (at time of writing).

These domains represent brilliant opportunities as there will not only be a great deal of search surrounding the terms, but very little competition standing in your way. With a little onsite optimisation and some targeted link building you should be able to move to the top of the SERPS without too much trouble and may even be considered a brand after a while due to a specific domain name, specific link building using domain name terms, and high search volume surrounding “your brand term”.

Careful Choice

I wouldn’t use this technique to determine the name for my new clothing retail site, but for a general blog I would much prefer to have a domain name that already had half a million searchers per month relating to it, than something like everythingandalways.com, which I would suggest gets none.

Author Information

Duncan is an SEO and marketing professional promoting a villas in France enterprise. He’s always looking for new ways to get the most out of the SERPS.

With a little effort, you can score a guest blogging shot.

“So how is all that guest posting working out for you?” was the message emailed to me early one morning.

Yeah, that was it. A good friend of mine, not too well known in SEO circles–but very effective in what he does nonetheless—wanted to find out if I was still as bullish about guest blogging as I was earlier this year when I joined Ann Smarty’s MyBlogGuest.com site. Ann’s site brings people together to offer and receive guest posts, at least that is her intention with her bustling community.

My friend knew I had written and shared a few articles of mine own, but that wasn’t what he was writing to me about. Instead, the question was directed toward all the articles I have been posting on five blogs I manage and/or own. Just in the past two months alone I had accepted at least two dozen guest appearances, something not lost on my friend.

I had to pause for several minutes to reflect on his question before crafting my reply. Heck, I knew that there was too much stuff bouncing around in my mind and decided to connect with him by phone instead of sending scads of emails back and forth.

Sometimes you have to just talk directly to people if you want to cut to the chase. And that conversation certainly wasn’t conducive to email exchanges or instant messaging, so I picked up the phone and gave my friend a buzz.

I’m terrible about remembering exact words people say. If I’m ever called to testify in court, I know that I’ll give generalized answers, but usually nothing too specific unless something is said and repeated often. So don’t call me as a witness—my version of the events may be too conceptual, lacking specifics. You’ll do hard time in the pokey if I’m called to the stand on your behalf!

But I did come away from our conversation with some points, based partly on my friend’s advice in addition to my observations. Together, we came up with four one-word fundamentals when accepting what we agreed make for a “winning” guest article:

1. Relevant – Seems like an obvious point, right? Well, yes. But, you can write a story relative to a blog, but miss the mark. Allow me give you an example. On Auto Trends, my car blog, I frequently run news-based stories telling my readers about this new model or product available or soon-to-arrive on the market. That angle has helped my site immensely, drawing the attention of car manufacturers, parts suppliers, technology providers and publicists who want me to publish their news.

In most cases related articles from guest bloggers are spot on, but on occasion they miss an all important point: telling readers why the product is important to them. I thought about what my friend said and agreed. It isn’t enough to tell them about your product, but to explain why it could improve their lives. A rudimentary marketing concept, but something often forgotten.

2. Newsy – I probably should use the word newsworthy here, but that term sounds too broad. Newsy is lighter and doesn’t carry the baggage of a press release. But it does convey something my friend insists people really want to know: how is what they’re saying relevant to what is going on in the reader’s world right now? Offering car insurance tips is fine, but what are some of the current trends impacting rates? Specifically, how are today’s safety technologies such as crash ratings lowering the cost of auto insurance?

3. Meaty – I mentioned to my friend a recent article I received and rejected that was 214 words long. Sure, with the author biography it pushed past 300 words, but it lacked even the basics of what I require when accepting an article and that basic is meat. I tossed the article back, explaining to the writer where he fell short.

Yes, we both agreed that a lot can be said with just a few words, but you still need about 400 words to form a conclusive article. Beyond your juicy title and teaer you must offer a killer introduction; three or four meaty, information-filled paragraphs; and conclude it with a worthy summation. Leave that out and your article will be incoherent; your readers won’t even get past the opening paragraph.

4. Provocative – On this point, I had the upper hand in the conversation. Said friend scored well on the first three points, but I shut him up long enough for him to listen and agree that our last point should include a measure of intrigue.

Allow me to explain: Lots of guest articles give out good information and may be solid on the first three points, but do little to stimulate conversation. And conversation is best stimulated by saying something challenging, thought-provoking or even inflammatory. Why? Because that is what blogging is all about: engaging your readers and encouraging them to respond. We all know that SEO basics require us to write good articles, but those articles packed with lots of related and stimulating comments tend to get bookmarked, shared through social media sites and pick up good links.

And it is those links which raise your visibility with your readers, customers and the search engines.

Before ending our call I told my friend that I wasn’t going to single him out by name in this article. That’s probably good because he regularly employs a number of gray hat techniques that could get him in trouble with his customers. Still, when it comes to white hat SEO he knows his stuff, but if you think I’m going to pay him for his advice you got another thing coming.

He’ll have to settle for my guest blogging as a ghost writer in order to receive payment in kind.