SEO and Article Farming: An Update

The SEO honeymoon is over.

Eric Schmidt himself admits other sites are doing admirable things to be found online.

Are you of the opinion that article farming is the next best way of building links and gearing traffic to your web pages? It WAS a valid (though tedious) trend of augmenting SEO campaigns until Google updated its search algorithm to limit the impact of article marketing!

Due to article farming, relevant results had almost become a needle in a haystack. Users had to sift through multiple result pages, only to find regurgitated junk. Google needed to clean its SEO landscape if it had hopes of surviving the competition unleashed by Yahoo! and Bing. This search engine giant responded with an update that changes all article marketing rules.

Quality Metrics Have Been Upped

The SEO campaigns that survived, did it solely on spins and extensive submission to hundreds of article directories. The change will give top priority to brands. Now the thrust will be on high-quality content. Therefore, webmasters should concentrate more on:

• Becoming an industry expert or authority in their niche. The quality of the content should be made very high. If such content cannot be written in-house, it can easily be outsourced.
• Restructure the importance of article directories in online marketing strategies. Reduce publishing content on article directories; keep more content on their web sites.
• Attain more natural link progression, rather than quick, paid links. An effective method can be to interact with audiences on niche forums, sell ideas and bring them to the site.
• Social media integration. Google has already started giving importance to social media content in its search algorithm. Thus, social media, now, will have dual benefits. It will help in direct customer engagement and indirectly, increasing search ranking.
• Create mechanisms to track metrics from your search results. O-p-t-i-m-i-z-e.

So, content will continue its reign as the king. However, for a bigger impact, webmasters should aim at creating an authoritative presence.