Writing Articles – Little Good for SEO

Writing Articles for SEO Purposes

A while back I mussed on the subject of what contribution if any, article writing would make to one’s SEO effort and ultimately sales.

I got a healthy spike in readership and a creditable number of comments.  The received wisdom was that article writing was an advisable way to improve one’s SEO and SERP results.

Be The First or Be the Best

There are some folk for whom writing articles is second nature -  they write articles and post to one or 2 sites, and because they are good at keyword research, they get modest, but good quality traffic.

There is a second group who are so rare I’ve met very few of them, those who are capable of original thought – such individuals would do very well to write for traffic garnering purposes.

For 99.8% of people out there, article marketing makes little sense.   Scribbling for distribution to article directories would be a capital notion of you were after the thrill of seeing your name in print or on the computer screen.  First of all, how many times have you, yes you, read an article on any subject – say blue widgets, and in the 2 minutes it took you to peruse the essay decided ‘I must buy the blue widget about which this epistle is so eloquent’?

Speaking from experience, in the event that the tyrants of the interweb, Google do not slap you with a duplicate content penalty – call it what you will, there is no merit in having more than one iteration of the same writing on the web, the page rank that would be attributed to you, if any is miniscule. I met this fellow, Richard who writes copy for SEO – he was so clear on the issue of multiple versions of the same writing, it’s a wonder people still fall into the ‘mass distribution’ trap.  On being republished, almost none of the link value would be passed to you, to couple insult to injury, there are the thieves who would rip off your content, and spin it, deploying a form of English encountered only on Uranus. Finally most web directories fail to pass on page rank, most have a crummy resource box, in the least valuable position – the bottom of the page. I ask myself, what’s the point?

The page rank value goes to the article directory!!

For completeness sake, the company Sheer, offers SEO software that calculates the relative merit of the links to your site – I guess reading this would have eroded the shock value, but the disappointment would induce a measure of bitterness in the effort you’ve wasted.

If you write it they will come.

At the risk of contradicting myself, if you wrote a first class piece, you would get the clicks, and you might get the click-through. But it had better be damned good – back to that one, be the first or be the best. Clear coherent ideas and argument: clear grammar; correct punctuation; clarity of purpose; being informative or witty; good spelling; avoidance of clichés and lazy stereotypes and clear grammar are some of the attributes of readable writing with a potential for popularity – you’d be like the man who invented a better mouse trap, and the world would beat a path to your door.  The English language is a beautiful thing, it possess the potential in the right hands of being musical and magical, in the event that you were of the mass incapable of realising this potential, pray tell, why waste your time? If you think with just a little help you could become a decent writer, peruse Caitlin Kelly‘s work.

We all have to start from somewhere.

If you want links, you’d do well to earn them, I give links freely on my blog and website (including those on this page) to people who’ve never asked for them – they’ve earned those links.  As my mother always told me and I have a feeling yours told you, ‘if it’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well’, I’ve taken the trouble to make the anchor text useful to the recepients of the links.  If you provide decent quality service, information, entertainment etc etc,  – in short, link worthy material, you would get links.

As someone who has seen all the James Bond films, the phrase ‘Never Say Never Again’ comes to mind, but for now, no articles for distribution on mass directories.

Money Saving Tip #2

Don’t Have savings.

Most people like the feeling of a growing number on the ‘balance’ section of their savings accounts. This feeling comes at rather a high price.

The person who saved £400 a month rather than ‘over pay’ his mortgage, at the end of the year would have saved £4,800 in capital, with £52 in interest (assuming today’s best saving’s rate of 2% in ‘interest free’ account such as an ISA.

If this person had a mortgage (assuming 4.25% [total cost - including fees]), the opportunity cost of £52 interest is £110.50 which he would have to pay in interest, it doesn’t end there – if the interest in paid out of taxed income,  the true cost of £52 in interest is illustrated by the table:

Rate of income tax	20%	40%	50%
Real cost of £52 in interest	£138.16	£184.17	£221

Overpay your mortgage

The moral of the story is, the warm glow that comes with running a savings account when one has debt, comes at a very high price.  The price is even higher, when one has none mortgage debt which often has a much higher rate of interest. For most folk with mortgages, there is often an ‘early repayment penalty’ – in my experience, it is worth paying the penalty to overpay the mortgage – it would however be best to constult your mortgage adviser to do the calculations on your behalf – most mortgage broker and many lenders have nifty tools which can run the figures in seconds.

Any old mortgage

I opened the tip#1 by intimating that a requirement for this was an Australian mortgage – this tip would work as almost as well if you had any old mortgage, even if your lender did not allow you take away  your over payment.

Discipline

Of course for this to work, using the ‘flexible’ mortgage method, needs discipline, no 2 ways about it, this would all be for nought if you abused the access you had, and blew your savings.

Always clear debt

Except if you plan a substantial purchase, the new car, the washing machine, next summer’s holiday, always clear your debt before saving, the warm glow from having a decent balance on one’s savings, ain’t worth it.

And the best bit is..

Even if you only ‘overpaid’ in this example by one year you’d have reduced the term of your mortgage from 25 years to 23 and a half.

Trust me, I’ve been a mortgage broker for over 21 years



Stealing Writing

Estate Planning for the Entrepreneur was published on our website a while ago

We posted Estate Planning for the Entrepreneur on our website a while ago, an on squido a while later, lo and behold,

Someone liked the article so much, he picked up, ‘spun it’ so it resembled a form of English spoken perhaps on Uranus, and submitted it, successfully  for publication to an article directory.

Now, the concepts discussed in my writing were hardly original, they’ve been around for centuries – the obvious exception being the attribution to George Bush. Every writer, irrespective of the level to which he is gifted or prolific wants to be quoted – that is the essence of writing – otherwise I’d keep my thoughts in my head, but no one wants his work ripped off.

All this fellow had to do was attribute the work to me. Or is this what we’d call a back handed compliment?

Estate Planning for the Entrepreneur was published on our website a while ago