Article marketing of some form or other is an important aspect of any SEO campaign. It involves syndicating your content to third party sites in order to bring you traffic and deliver high PR links from well known and aged domains.

Although article marketing has been around a long time, recent developments at the search engines mean there are a few more things you need to do to ensure continued success.

Anchor Text Variety

These days most marketers have heard of  anchor text, the clickable words that are hilighted in a link. Search engines use these words to help determine relevancy of the page the link points to. For example if a lot of people link to your site with a keyword “food for cats” as a clickable link, then search engines will assume your site is probably about cat food.

Search engines will also “crawl” the page that link goes to and determine if it is relevant to the keyword. Many internet marketers figured that out and started using article marketing to generate hundreds if not thousands of links with the exact same keyword phrase. That worked very well in the past.

But recently major search engines like Google & Bing started analyzing anchor text profiles, looking for patterns that appeared abnormal in order to penalize marketers who are trying to game the system. When people link naturally to other web pages there is variety in the anchor texts (see Link Anchor Text: SEO Backlinks Profile – 6 Anchor Text Examples To Copy). So when Google notices thousands of backlinks with the indentical anchor text of “food for cats”, it  smells a rat, and devalues the links accordingly.

To avoid this problem, many article marketers now vary the anchor text they link back with. For example exchanging “food for cats” for things like “the best cat food”, “food cat for older cats”, “cat food for kittens”, and “excellent resource for cat food” would be more natural and less suspicious. You can even automatically  “spin” the anchor text to achieve greater variation of different keyword phrases.

Unique Resource Boxes

The resource box or author bio is a short piece of text at the end of an article where you can promote yourself and your products or services. The resource box is especially important as the place you can place one or two links to your pages. Five years ago it was normal to distribute the same article to multiple directories with the same resource box and anchor text — and it used to work like a charm.

Unfortunately, those days are long gone. After the recent Panda update, Google started to look at duplicate content very closely. Now even if you have a unique article but the same resource box, you might still find yourself with a duplicate content problem. What you need to do then is change things a bit to deliver the same message but with a different spin.

For example, you can change a sentence  like “The best plumber in New York City” into something like  “New York City’s best plumbing service”, “Plumbing contractor in New York City”, or “New York’s best plumber” etc.

Many experienced internet marketing professionals who are very familiar with article marketing are still not taking these essential extra steps. Don’t be one of them.  Variety in anchor text is essential to avoid an over-optimization penalty of some kind, and you cannot always use the exact same resource box  if you want to avoid any suggestion of duplicate content and gain the most from your article marketing.

Find out more about Article Marketing and Article Syndication by claiming your Free Guide at: www.MasterArticleMarketer.com