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Build SEO Links & Web Traffic With Your Content
By Cpxclick.com (c) 2006

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 traffïc 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.

- Traffïc generation. The links in distributed content generate
  traffïc in the förm of highly qualified leads: people who liked
  what you had to say. Distributing content gets you traffïc 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 traffïc.

- 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 investmënt 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 wïnner.

- Requires significant investmënt. 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 investmënt.

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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CPXclick (http://www.cpxclick.com/) enables web-publishers to
realize tangible revenues from their immediate traffic by
turning user clicks into real-time on-the-spot payoffs. By
partnering with the top Advertisers and PPC search engines,
CPXclick provides its affiliates with the highest paying results
and hence higher earning potential per each click.
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