Article marketing and landing page quality...
I write articles for clients who then use them for marketing purposes. Although there are some valid arguments regarding the future potential of what we could now call "traditional article marketing," I maintain that it remains an incredibly effective way of simultaneously encouraging direct traffic flow and increasing one's cache of backlinks for better SERPs.
Yesterday, I mentioned Google's recent tightening of landing page quality standards. It looks like one of the major players in the article directory business is moving in that same direction.
Christopher Knight, who heads the popular article repository EzineArticles.com, has announced that the site will also begin to assess the quality of landing pages from article resource boxes as part of an "obsession with wanting to improve our users’ experience."
Knight listed a series of "initial guidelines" that may become part of EzineArticle's landing page assessment.
At this point, it appears as though landing page grading is in the "design stage," but if Knight's initial ideas take hold, many of the site's contributors will have to take a good look at their article marketing approach.
Google's LPQ assessment, as discussed yesterday, is mindful of content considerations. Knight lists providing "related/relevant" value related to submitted articles as a probable factor in the Ezine evaluation scheme and also questions the value of low-content squeeze pages.
So, depending on your approach to article marketing, you may want to do some landing page repair. You could, of course, call on a professional writer to help you make adjustments.
However, I'm not mentioning the EzineArticle statement exclusively as a means of directly drumming up business for Content Done Better. Instead, I am concerned about squeeze page-reliant clients and other with whom I have worked on articles experiencing decreased effectiveness from their campaigns due to a failure to adjust to EzineArticle's eventual adjustments.
I also think that the almost back-to-back announcements regarding the expectation for superior landing pages from both PPC ads and article resource boxes may be indicative of a general trend toward valuing end user experience over other considerations. The rise of that perspective is long overdue and should encourage webmasters and marketers of all sorts to concentrate on both good design and, of course, good content.
