It is not big secret that article marketing is great for SEO and traffic. However, if you have to keep writing a post for your blog and a post each for 20 article directories, can you really get through the writing?

The answer is to ‘repurpose’ content. In short, write a post, publish it to your blog and then syndicate it to various article websites, making changes as required so that it becomes a stand alone piece.

However, with talk of Google duplicate content filters in the past many people are frightened of this. But they shouldn’t be! Late in 2010 Google updated this filter and it now works properly.

It used to be that Google would gather together all websites with the same article / post and only include the highest PageRank website in the results. This was their arbitrary way of reducing loads of very similar content to just the one result. A great idea for people searching for content, but blatantly often unfair on the original source.

But with the death of PageRank (how else do you explain 1 PageRank update in the last year?) and Google moving onwards to a fairer system, it seems they have hit upon a method that works.

What seems to happen now is that they are paying more attention to links. If the same content appears on 10 websites and they all link to the same website, which is also displaying that content, then it is the 11th website that appears above the rest!

So if you re-purpose content and include a link back n your biography, you are forming this web of links and should be credited as the original source.

If you want to know more about this, have a read through the set of posts I wrote about duplicate content over on my web design blog. It follows an experiment I ran last November and my own page is still the first result of almost 100 results returned.

The chatter in some search engine forums is that observers are seeing early signs that a PageRank update is about to take place.

Actually, the chatter was the end of last week and speculated that it would have taken place in the weekend that has just gone, but looking at recent PageRank update dates I chose to ignore them and instead expected a September update.

Why? Well recent updates have, on the whole, been early in the month and this weekend just seemed too late.

I’ve not heard of anyone talking much about any significant August updates to the values displayed, although I presume there were some slight changes (there usually are), so the September update (if everyone is correct) will be the first proper PageRank update since 3rd April.

I am sure that on Sunday morning many bloggers will be switching on their computers, going straight to their blogs and looking at that green bar to see if there has in fact been a September update. If there has, then we will find out whether Google is in the mood for punishing those selling paid posts or is just ignoring what is going on.

Either way, for those blogs that see an increase in position there will be joy at being able to charge more and those that see a decline in position will be upset that their potential advertising revenue has been cut.

As it is, for this blog anything must be an improvement. I started it too late to get a decent ranking before the April update and am hoping that September will see some improvements.

Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) is a robust feature rich application that will help you in all aspects of your website’s SEO and Promotion; from Keyword Research to finding Link Partners and a host of other functions. Of course the most important feature is search engine ranking on all major search engines across multiple keywords. It saves you hours of tedious work while monitoring your site’s rankings and generates tabular and graphical reports that will help you check not just the position of your website but the position of your competitors sites as well.

SEO Consultants like me will find the tool extremely useful since it not only monitors clients website ranking, it also generates and emails neatly formatted reports after a scheduled update. All this is done automatically, I mean automatically without any intervention and can be scheduled at night.

Some of the features of this tool include:

Triggers can be set to automatically alert you to certain events that occur (e.g. a decrease in ranking on certain money keywords)

AWR runs on Mac, Windows and Linux

A cool Keyword Research Tool that lets you compare density and prominence of keywords between your site and your competition. You can even compare two different versions of a website in time to see the new trends. The tool helps you find out different keyword related information

The Keyword analysis tool is useful for finding out various keywords related information like keyword density, occurrences in the page, occurrences in the anchor text and the word count of each phrase found. This is very helpful because you can better understand why sites are ranking ahead of you.

Search engine submission feature- Although not the reason I was attracted to this service, it is important to note that the service also provides you with guided manual submission to the most important search engines. Personally I like the guided manual approach because search engines like Google are not “happy” with automated submissions- particularly software that automatically builds link to your site.

Keyword Importing-If you have many keyword you want analyzed, the service allows you to import a list of keywords which is a real time saver. With such a feature, you’ll find you will be more willing to perform a comprehensive keyword analysis as related to ranking. Performing a more comprehensive analysis often yields new long tail keyword where there is less competition and more of an opportunity for you to gain high ranking in the search engines.

Fast Update Time- Using other tools you’ve probably noticed that updating ranking for many sites often just takes a significant amount of time. This service allows you to use multiple proxy servers which provides information much more quickly.

Printable Reports- Another nice feature is that you can print reports and/or export data from the service. This feature allows people like seo consultants to present ranking results in a professional manner without spending time preparing the reports manually.

Keyword Strategy Development- This service actually encompasses much more than rank reporting. The service generates related keywords and suggests keyword you may want to optimize for.

There are a few indispensable tools that should be in every SEO Consultant or Webmaster’s tool shed and Advanced Web Ranking is certainly high up there in my opinion.

Is link building in any form worth while, or is it a waste of time? Do links benefit your web site and push you up the results, or is it all one big myth? Have a look at my experiment results!

I have of late been carrying out a few experiments with link building to see what the effects are. I am part way through the entire test, which aims to find out if too many links can equally destroy the good work. But I am noticing several interesting results.

For my test I picked on a new site of my own that included a claim phrase from a paid to post system. This claim phrase is a random group of words that is just found on web-sites trying to become members of the system, so it is very unlikely that anyone else on the internet is running any SEO on it.

My blog, at the outset of the experiment, was 35th in the Google search results for this claim phrase and nowhere to be found on Bing or Yahoo. I used the phrase as the anchor text for a link to the post page from a PR3 site that I also control.

Give it a week and Google has been all more than the PR3 website. Funnily, this site is suddenly 12th on the results. At first, the blog moved up from 35th to 15th and then 10th, finally stepping above my PR3 site.

So through a single link on a PR3 page, my site jumped 2 full pages for this totally uncontested phrase on Google. It hadn’t moved a single place until the day I saw that the PR3 website had been revisited by Google. So, the merely explanation for the jump of 25 positions is this new found link to it.

But, it is also interesting to note Bing and Yahoo. Neither had the post page listed in the search results prior to the link going live. Yahoo did quite quickly collection the PR3 site with the collection on it for the search terms, which was quite promising, but it took a few more days until it also listed the post, down on the bottom of page 4.

The interesting difference between Google, Bing and Yahoo is the number of results each return. Bing and Yahoo return 30 – 40 results on this search yet exactly the same search on Google returns almost 800 existing results.

It appears that Google is being less fussy about what pages it caches and lists in the search engines. And when looking at how numerous pages of the website that Yahoo has indexed, they are nigh on all category and archive pages. There is only one post page listed in the archives – the one in this testing.

So, it looks as although because of one PR3 page pointing to the post, Google has promoted the website from 35th to 10th and Yahoo has taken an interest in the page and also cached it and listed it well. Bing though, is only being slow (it hasn’t visited the PR3 page for a few time).

Therefore, inbound links are beyond doubt the lifeblood of a web site. They do move you up the results and make search engines take notice of the pages. Next, I’ll test whether a web site wide link destroys the position or aids it!

Most of the weight as to what terms are significant to your site come not from what you say on your website pages, but what other websites say around you. And this is by how they link to you.

Each link has what is called an anchor text – this is the piece of text that the visitor will click on to use the link. But the search engines take a look at this anchor and use it as a vote for the website. So, if the anchor text is “search engine tips” then you have 1 vote for that term pointing to your website. Get an adequate amount of votes and you will be top of the collection.

Historically, website owners have done this by running link exchange sites on their websites. Mass exchanges, where you link to another website in return for them linking to you. This was fine, but as with the content issue, everything to optimse a website needs to shout out ‘natural’. Search engines can simply spot huge directories and most have no page rank and are useless.

So, we need a way of link building that gives natural links, ideally from web sites that we are not enforced to link to in order to keep the link back in place. And the remedy to this is article writing. I’ll look at how and the other reasons later in the article.

So filling meta data and tags with keywords is old hat and link sites are out of the window because they have no value. But we need links and to do that we write articles. But, what is so good round article writing? Article writing certainly does get sites to the top of search engine rankings, but that is only one part of the story.

For numerous web-sites, there is a market of potential customers that spread far and wide and some of these are researching more information by reading article directories. Others might be looking for offerings and services and will stumble onto articles on sites.

Either group, if interested in the article, could then see the author’s biography at the end of the article and then visit the author’s web site. With one recent brand new website, before it had even been cached by the search engines, I managed to get it up to 40 new unique traffic per day, merely through people reading a few articles on 1 top article directory.

Also, given that a chief incentive for writing articles is the search engine benefit, the plusses go on. Not only does the article get printed on the directory that you submit it to, but other sites and websites will pick up the article, print it and link back to you.

So, we write articles for 2 reasons. First they are amazing with the search engines and boost our ranking position and second people will read them on the sites we submit them to and visit our websites. But how do we write them?

If you are writing a blog then you want people to know what you are doing so they visit you. You want sites such as Technorati listing you and recommending you, but these all require a ping. So what does pinging do?

Are You There?
You can ‘ping’ a lot of things, not just a blog. Many years ago, before blogs took off, we would ping machines remotely and if we got an answer back, then we knew they were up and running. You can even do this yourself from your computer, maybe across your network to other machines.

And that is basically what a ping is – one computer seeing if another computer is responding.

How Does This Help?
But this does not exactly help our blogs. The ping service evolves a bit from just a basic message saying “I’m here, are you there?”. If you ping a website service, rather than just them answering that they are there, it is taken as an indication from the site sending the ping that they want some attention.

The site receiving the message will reply back that it has received your message, usually with a “success” message. Of course, to reply they need to now what site sent the request, so as well as “Are you there?”, your message has included your website address as the sender.

Getting Clever With The Process
This is the clever part. The recipient strips the message apart and stores your website address for processing. It takes the ping as an indication that you want them to visit you, usually because you have created new content that you want them to look at.

Identify New Content, Quickly
So, at a later point in time, maybe instantly, maybe later that day – it is entirely up to the service what they do – their robot is sent to visit your homepage to see what is new. It is a flag to various systems that you have updated your website.

And this is why we use pings. It enables us to tell a variety of other websites that we have new content and that they should come over and see it. On a good day, I’ve seen Google come visiting quite quickly after the post has been published, thanks to the ping, and then the post listed and the new page cached on Google within a couple of hours.

The Future Is Pinging
This is the way that search engines like Google are moving. They want to be able to grab new content as soon as it is made public and by pinging them they are able to do that. So it helps them to do what they want – get new content and quick – and helps us do what we want – get our new content onto the search engines.

A Little Message Goes A Long Way
So, pinging just basically shouts over to various important websites that we now have an update on our own website and we want them to come and visit it. And by sending this little message, we are hoping to increase our search engine exposure.

If you are struggling to optimise your site for one or more of the main search engines, then no doubt you will be wondering what you need to do to get to the top of one or more of them. But, what are the differences in methods for optimising for each search engine? What does each search engine favour?

Much is talked around search engine optimisation tactics and what is required to get to the top of any particular search engine. But, most of these discussions centre around what is required for Google optimisation. This is fine, considering they currently carry most of the search traffic, but what around Yahoo and Bing, both of which have loads of visitors?

A while ago I started to optimise two of my own different sites for the same keyword phrase, and over the 15 months since I started this I have watched them move around and finally one of them take top spot on Google. At the same time, the other web site takes 2nd spot on Yahoo and Bing and 4th on Google.

This is remarkable, but the site that is 1st on Google is not on the top page of Yahoo nor MSN, which tells me ample round the different tactics used to optimise for these search engines.

Now I have to point out that I have done heaps more work for the site that is top of Google and that is why it, rather than the other web site, takes top spot there. But, that indicates clearly what is required to reach the dizzy heights of first place on Google – a load of article writing and guest posting. I have lost count of how numerous articles and guest posts I have submitted to a whole arrange of directories and websites, but it has been done on the side of other activities, so it is achievable by anyone.

The crucial factor is that the site does not feature top 10 in Yahoo and Bing, though the other site is second, with less articles and guest posts. For these search engines other factors are important.

With these search engines, the inbound links have been indispensable. That website would not have risen the way it has without them, but Yahoo and Bing do not put so much total faith in the incoming links. For the web site that does well on these two search engines is also the website that I did a little bit (but not too much!) work on the code.

Both web sites have the keyword phrase in the title meta, but it is only the one that does well in Bing and Yahoo that then goes on with supplementary mentions of the phrase. This website also has the search terms in the meta description, the keywords and twice in the body (once being in emphasised text). They also appear in a h1, but as part of a longer expression.

So to reach top spot in Google, one mention on the page is enough (and even that is not required), but to rank well for Bing & Yahoo, make certain that you do at least reference the search terms a couple of times, but do not go excessive.