SEL: Google's Matt Cutts on Article Marketing and SEO

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Search marketing in the new media era.

August 22, 2006

Google's Matt Cutts on Article Marketing and SEO

Matt Cutts illustrates the art of crafting highly useful content in his recent post, SEO Advice: Writing useful articles that readers will love.

In it he details the process he went through to write Changing the default printer on Linux and Firefox:

Notice what I did with keywords. I carefully chose keywords for the title and the url (note that I used “change” in the url and “changing” in the title).

The categories on my post (”How to” and “Linux”) give me a subtle way to mention Linux again, and include a couple extra ways that someone might do a search–lots of user type “how to (do what they want to do).”

I thought about the words that a user would type in when looking for an answer to their question, and tried to include those words in the article. I also tried to think of a few word variations and included them where they made sense (file vs. files, bash and bashrc, Firefox and Mozilla, etc.).

I’m targetting a long-tail concept where someone will be typing several words, so I’m probably in a space where on-page keywords are enough to rank pretty well. I don’t need anchor-text for “linux default printer” or similar phrases; in the on-page space, I’d recommend thinking more about words and variants (the “long-tail”) and thinking less about keyword density or repeating phrases."

The Article Marketing concept and its relevance to branding and search marketing captured my attention several months back in:

Targeting Your Article Marketing Campaign to Your Site's Key Conversion Pages

Adding a Blog to Your Article Marketing Strategy

That work lead me to write A Market Conversation Strategy Guide for SMBs: Driving Search Presence through Industry Participation, which now has me very busy turning theory into action/cash for MarketSmart Interactive clients and prospects.

Aaron Wall expanded on a line from Cutts' post, in Hard Answers Are Easy Links. In it he notes: "If it is hard to find the answer to a question then
* it is probably easy to be one of the best answers
* those who stumble across your answer will appreciate your effort, relevancy, and knowledge"

On ThreadWatch Walls noted, "Cutts recently talked down keyword density in a post that had SEO in it so many times that it crashed Firefox when I tried highlighting the term."

Also on ThreadWatch an excellent historic roundup of linkbait articles: From the Filthy Linking Rich to the Art of Link Bait. Though I must say the endlessly referential linkbait conversation's getting a bit echoey...

Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

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