By : Nidhi Gupta

Search engines love some links more than others. A simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn’t have as much value and doesn’t receive the same weight as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link - the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred.

Article Syndication

In recent years, many sites have employed article syndication to develop links. These site owners write articles of interest to a particular audience. The site owners then offer these articles for free to other relevant sites in exchange for a link back to the originator of the content in the ‘about the author’ section of the article.

A single site owner can submit dozens of articles for syndication receiving an inbound link from each article in return for the free use of content. They can also watch other sites post the content virally to keep their sites fresh, as well.

Sites need fresh content so many will happily display your article and provide a link to your site. It’s a tried and true link building tactic. However, search engines are programmed to seek out the most natural, and therefore valuable, links they can find.

Articles can be syndicated through sites like Go Articles and Ezine Articles, where you’re allowed to include a small blurb about the author with a link back to the author’s site. Since those links appear in the body of the page, they appear to be more valuable in comparison to most purchased or reciprocal links which often appear at the bottom of a page column, or in the footer surrounded by lots of other links, but not necessarily the best way to acquire inbound links.

In addition, syndication leads to duplication when a single article appears on 10 sites all at the same time. This diminishes the quality of the text and the back link to the author’s site. It’s still more valuable than a plain link exchange but search engines are placing less emphasis on syndicated content. So, what’s a site owner to do?

Hosted Web Content

The way hosted content works is that you, the author, pay a site owner to display your article. However, instead of back links to your site coming at the end of the article, you embed links in the body of the text surrounded by your target keywords and actually useful content for the reader. In the ‘eyes’ of a search engine, this is among the highest valued back link.

Hosted content is basically renting a page on another site with links to your site embedded in the main body of the article. The website that hosts the content receives payment from the author plus fresh content, the author gets a valuable back link and visitors to the hosting site get useful content.

This strategy is simply doing what search engines want us to do - produce content that’s useful, beneficial and appears on quality sites. Not only does a quality piece of content receive more visibility when hosted on an authoritative site, it also delivers increased benefit to the author and the page may even rank itself for target key phrases. When a major site hosts your content, you gain from its page rank, in strong testimonials and referrals.

Designing a Hosted Content Page

Design the hosted content page using standard SEO conventions: a keyword-savvy page title, main heading (h1), sub-headings (h2, h3 etc.) and a keyword density of less than 5%. Any higher and search engines may consider the content to be “spamish” regardless of where the content appears.

Now comes the most important part. As you write the article, carefully place links to topically relevant pages on your own site within the body of the article’s text. These are high value links that will improve your SEO.

It’s also important to place your articles on sites that are topically related to your piece (and probably already rank for related topics). The authority of the site hosting your content, the relevance of the site (topically speaking) and that back link make your site look stronger as far as search engines are concerned.

Remember also that the quality of the content to which you link also matters. Link to strong pages (those with quality back links) on your site, as well. Your article should reference other authoritative, relevant articles so that search engines see that your piece was written to offer real value to readers.

It’s not Quantity, it’s Quality

It’s no longer simply a matter of how many links point to a site. There are many cases of sites in which 50 quality links outrank sites with hundreds of links. It’s not quantity, it’s the quality of the links that improve rankings in the search engine results pages.

Editorial links (links in hosted content) are more ‘natural’ from a search engine’s perspective and, therefore, more valuable because the article has, at most, two or three targeted links pointing to your site’s pages. Because these links are found on pages optimised with your keywords, search engines will consider them extremely relevant to the subject at hand.

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