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Build SEO Links & Web Traffic With Content Distribution
By Joel Walsh (c) 2005

Many website owners and SEOs (search engine optimizers) believe
that trading links is the most effective way to build the
hundreds of links necessary for good search-engine ranking. But
there's another way to build links that deserves your attention:
content distribution.

A time-honored way of getting one-way inbound links to your
website is to distribute content, usually articles, for other
websites to publish in exchange for a backlink. Most often, the
backlink is included in an "author's resource box," which is a
brief "about the author" paragraph promoting the author's site.

Content distribution has usually been thought of as a website
promotion strategy rather than an SEO or link-building
strategy. But there are good reasons for adding content
distribution to your SEO toolkit.

SEO Benefits of Distributing Content vs. Reciprocal Linking Alone

* Links come faster. You send an email with your article to a
relevant website owner. That's it. No adding links to your site
and then checking and re-checking for compliance. That means you
can get more links from the time and resources you spend on
link-building.

* Links are not always available through reciprocal linking.
Many website owners simply refuse to do reciprocal linking.
Content distribution is one way to reach this large segment of
website owners.

* Links are one-way. Many SEO experts believe that reciprocal
links may be "dampened" by the search engines; i.e., they will
not help you rank as high as one-way links. Of course,
reciprocal links are still valuable, there's a just a question
of how valuable they really are.

* Links per page are fewer. Many SEO experts believe that the
higher the number of links per page, the less SEO value each
link has. When a website publishes an article, the author's
backlink is often the only live link to another website on that
page.

Distinct Non-SEO Benefits of Distributing Content

What makes content distribution a truly special method of link
building is that it's the only method where the non-SEO
benefits may even outweigh the SEO benefits:

* Website building. If you create special content for your
link-building campaign, you can publish it on your site. As a
general rule, the more content your site has, the more search
engine traffic it will receive. Just publish the article and
get it indexed in search engines before distributing it, which
should help you to outrank your republishers in search engines
for that same content.

* Traffic generation. The links in distributed content generate
traffic in the form of highly qualified leads: people who liked
what you had to say. Distributing content gets you traffic even
when it doesn't get you a link. If your article gets picked up
by a large-circulation email newsletter, you will get a flood
of highly qualified traffic.

* Authority. Distributing content is the only linking campaign
method that can make the recipient website and its owners
appear authoritative. There are thousands of internet gurus who
owe their lucrative reputations entirely to the articles they've
distributed.

* Mindshare. Distributing articles is the only linking campaign
method that can help you spread an idea. This makes article
distribution invaluable for launching new products or services.


Drawbacks of Content Distribution

Of course, nothing good ever came easy. Any website owners who
are looking for SEO magic beans will be disappointed by content
distribution:

* Desired anchor text is not always available. Unfortunately,
the content management systems most widely in place today make
it easier for website owners to accept content as text rather
than HTML. This means that many website owners simply have
their content management system convert a URL into a live link,
rather than taking the time to code in the anchor text. Still,
an experienced content distributor can usually find ways around
this problem to make sure that many if not most of the links use
anchor text.

* Results are variable. Content distribution is not quite as
sure a thing as reciprocal linking. The site that publishes
your article has to like not only your site, but also your
article. This is especially true for the passively-generated
links that come from content clearinghouse websites. But
results can vary the other way, too: an article that catches on
will yield more links than you ever could have gotten through
the same investment in reciprocal linking. In order to minimize
the risk of content not catching on with website owners, you
should make sure your content is high-quality, and also plan
for a large content distribution campaign: the more content you
try, the more likely you are to find a winner.

* Requires significant investment. You need high-quality
content, expertise in content distribution, and quite a few
work-hours to distribute the content and track the results. Of
course, the cost has to be weighed against the cost of
reciprocal linking, which is also significant. These costs can
be mitigated by outsourcing the entire process from soup to
nuts to a content distribution specialist. Costs of outsourcing
content distribution compare favorably with costs of outsourcing
reciprocal link building.

* Requires special expertise. There are numerous newbie
pitfalls to distributing content, from improperly formatting
articles to writing a bad introductory email to accompany
content submissions. You generally have to have done numerous
campaigns to truly get the feel for it. Again, this requirement
has to be weighed against the real-world requirement of special
expertise in other link campaign methods. Again, this drawback
can be mitigated by outsourcing your project to a specialist.

In short, there are benefits to both reciprocal linking and
content distribution. All things being equal, you should use
both. Still, content distribution is the only one method that
carries substantial non-SEO benefits as well. Plus, a
professionally managed content distribution campaign may even
yield greater SEO results than reciprocal linking would for the
same investment.

You owe it to yourself or your clients to add content
distribution to your SEO-toolkit--before the owner of the next
highest-ranking site finds out about it.

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Joel Walsh is the owner of UpMarket Content, offering a fully
managed content distribution campaign guaranteed to get you at
least one hundred one-way inbound links for every three pages
of content: http://upmarketcontent.com/website-promotion-package.htm
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