The latest craze in the SEO world is to write articles for the purpose of link building. Everyone is doing it these days, there are companies that specialize in writing content for search engines, there are companies that put it in their link building plans. But as time moves on with SEO, tactics to rank well changes. I believe the fundamentals to not change but influencing those rankings, when the core of your work is not 100% true, does change. What do I mean by that?
Yesterday, some person calls me asking me my advice on having a company write articles for him to build up his linkage and page count. I asked him, how long have you been in business? He said about a year or so. I asked him, are you an expert on what you sell? He said, not really. I asked him, can you write about your business and products? He said, no not really, there is nothing much I can say about them. Then I told him, you can pay someone to add content to your site, but I am not sure about how beneficial it will be in the long run.
He then continues by explaining that this company told him that they can write the content because they are experts in search engines. They tailor the content to the search engines, he told me. I laughed at that. I said the whole purpose these days is to write content that people want to link to. Search engine do not give you links that are counted to your link popularity. You need to write content that others want to link to. And in my opinion, if you are not passionate about what you are writing, then it will be hard to get links pointing to your content. So that content will just count towards your page index count and nothing more.
A good thread at Search Engine Watch Forums sprung up last week named Recommendations on Content to Attract Links which caught my radar this morning. Justilien wrote a post that covers many of the questions one must ask himself, when writing an article. If those questions are answered positively, then you have a great change of getting inbound links to your articles, if not - then probably not. But it all boils down to, in my opinion, "writing about something you believe in" as Andy AtkinsKruger said.
