Writing Articles: to E-zines for Backlinks or Own Site for Content

[luciddreams]

Hi!

I have an reference website to answer a variety of different questions that people search for. The website has been up since 2009. I can't seem to rank in Google at all except for one keyword (there are 60 keywords targeted across the entire website which is hundreds of pages). My content is clearer and more informative than my my competition who gets rank #1 with most keywords, even though I have better code and a cleaner leaner layout. I have very few links back, due to being buried by Google search.

I was thinking about writing articles to submit to e-zines to get some quality links back and bump up my search rank. Then I was wondering if I'd be better off turning my homepage into a blog and just publish articles on my own site for better content. Especially since the type of information on my site is static--it doesn't really change, so it rarely gets updated. Which strategy would be more effective?

Thank you in advance!

[Test-ok]

If you can't rank in Google at all except 1 out of 60 keywords on a 3 year old site with clearer and more information than the number the #1 site. Links might not be your only problem.
And how is your code better than your competitors? what makes it better? or do you mean errors?

[NathanielB]

Hi!

I have an reference website to answer a variety of different questions that people search for. The website has been up since 2009. I can't seem to rank in Google at all except for one keyword (there are 60 keywords targeted across the entire website which is hundreds of pages). My content is clearer and more informative than my my competition who gets rank #1 with most keywords, even though I have better code and a cleaner leaner layout. I have very few links back, due to being buried by Google search.

You may think your content is better, but do your current visitors and would new visitors find it to be of a high quality and informative?

Your coding and layout will make no difference to your rankings, basically as long as the search engines can reach, see, read and index your site your layout and coding will make little to no difference (I say little to no because a poor layout could effect rankings, but code will no as long as your site is accessible).

I was thinking about writing articles to submit to e-zines to get some quality links back and bump up my search rank. Then I was wondering if I'd be better off turning my homepage into a blog and just publish articles on my own site for better content. Especially since the type of information on my site is static--it doesn't really change, so it rarely gets updated. Which strategy would be more effective?

Thank you in advance!

I would look into publishing content on your site as well as doing some guest posting etc - that's sharing content on quality sites, not just sending it to poor quality article site as those don't work so well these days!

Have you checked out Guest blogging: Looking for guest bloggers or guest post? Join MyBlogGuest!? You should be able to find some quality related sites to guest post on, also use google, if you search for relevant sites in your niche and contact them with some content (or something) of value to them and their visitors, you should be able to land yourself not only somewhere good to guest post, but also a valuable contact for future opportunities!

[ushahm01]

content is the king in seo.keep updating on your content.put an unique and interesting content on your website.so seo according to the search engine guidlines.

[NathanielB]

content is the king in seo.keep updating on your content.put an unique and interesting content on your website.so seo according to the search engine guidlines.

Huu?!

Can you maybe try to write in full sentences so people can understand what your trying to say please!

As for content is king, that's not quite right, we have had many discussions about this and its "QUALITY is content king", but what's a king without his followers? Nothing, so you also want and need find and earn some QUALITY followers for your king, and guess what, these followers come in the form of others linking to you!

So if QUALITY content is king, QUALITY RELEVANT links are queen!

You need both in other works, and one good way to earn quality links is with quality content, so if you have the time and knowledge you could use your writing skills to earn you some great links!

But please note the importance of QUALITY and RELEVANCE in all of this, because if your not offering something of quality to a relevant place it will just get lost in the masses of the rest of the web!

[luciddreams]

Awesome, thank you! I will work on turning my homepage to a blog and regularly posting quality content and in time the quality links will come.

Just to clarify, what I mean by my code is better is that my main competition uses tables to format his site. As a result, his HTML is bulky and a much larger percentage of his HTML is full of table coding. His layout isn't the best either. My code is CSS and everything is cleaner and leaner-especially since much is exported to a style-sheet which only needs to be downloaded once for all pages. Though I suspect none of this really matters to the search engines anyway.

[NathanielB]

My code is CSS and everything is cleaner and leaner-especially since much is exported to a style-sheet which only needs to be downloaded once for all pages. Though I suspect none of this really matters to the search engines anyway.

It may help a little due to load speed being faster, but its not something that's going to get you to rank above them in the SERPs on its own.

You need to build/earn quality links from relevant sites in your niche as well as offer quality, relevant content which will make your visitors want to come back.

[Brian Mitchell]

I was looking some information on Backlinks.. Thanks for this valuable suggestions..