Secondary Article Writing - Link Baiting

This little writeup centers on the problems of getting "natural"" links from other websites from article writing. This idea is also called "link baiting" whereby webmasters of other sites link to you without any direct prompting by you and is very much encouraged by Search Engines. In other words, webmasters or other users post links to your article page because they would like others to know more about it. Think useful.

In all seriousness, there is only one way to do that. Content. Unique, useful content gives webmasters or users a powerful incentive to link to you. What is more useful to their users or fellow users than relevant information? I am pretty sure that if you found a good SEO technique, you would want to share it with your fellow webmasters right? Maybe.

Composing informative articles can help you achieve that goal. But it's my opinion that if you do the usual of writing and submitting them to article directories, you lose the benefit of having unique content on your site. I mean, it's also available elsewhere as well. You have to worry about duplicate content penalty and how it will affect your rankings. And good article directories will have a lot of other useful and sometimes even unique content for it's visitors. Worse of all webmasters may link to the article directory page where your article is submitted instead of your site. Althought in the end, it still benefits you (in both ranking and PageRank because of the backlinks from these submitted articles) indirectly, it isn't as good as a direct link to your site. What you should be looking for is a direct link to your site or your article page from other webmasters.

You can always try to rephrasing your article so that it will look different from those submitted to article directories. While this method can help minimize the risk of duplicate content penalty from Search Engines, human readers will realize that they are actually the same. So, there is no incentive for them to link to your site instead of the article directory.

How about article exchange with relevant sites? You write an article, your partner site owner writes another article and both of you exchange (with backlinks and all) articles. Yes, this is a better solution than submitting to article directories for getting unique and useful content. Since these articles are not submitted to article directories, they are hopefully not published elsewhere, eliminating the problem of duplicate content. And both of you are in the same related industry, you could get at least some traffic too. But the biggest disadvantage here is that you would not get as many backlinks and traffic as you do with submitting to numerous quality article directories. If no one knows about your article, they can't very well link to it! And some webmasters feel very uncomfortable having someone else's content on their site.

Now let's try another solution - secondary article writing. The idea here is to write articles regarding a secondary subject away from your main article. Let's say your main article is about flowers. But this article will not be the one submitted to article directories. You then write "supporting" or secondary articles about planting flowers, weeding, insecticides and so on and submit these articles to the directories. By using this method, you will have unique content which other webmasters will link to, but you also get traffic and backlinks from article directories as well. It is exactly like writing a long article, dividing it into different parts and submitting these to article directories while keeping your main article on your own site. Anyone reading the article in the article directory will be directed to your site, which has even more information on that particular topic. You will have just baited someone to link to you!

Summarizing your article and submit the summarizied article to the directories can also achieve this goal. Sort of like a "Teaser" article. The "trick" is to have more useful and unique content than the article in the article directory. Give them a reason to link back to you. Everybody wants MORE information, and they will be willing to tell their friends or their users where to get it.

Here are some more articles:
Internal Links - How to make full use of them
Effective Directory Submission
Increasing your Page Rank In Detail
OnPage SEO For Web Directory Owners
Link Exchanges Techniques
Additional Benefits of a High Page Rank (PR)
Secondary Article Writing - Link Baiting