I heard article marketing is helpful for increasing rankings and traffic for websites.
How do you do it correctly and do i need to invest into article marketing to make it work?
I have used article marketing extensively over the years as both an SEO tool and a tool for generating direct traffic for a website. Here is what applies right now in 2015 according to my testing.
Article directory marketing = (publishing articles on article directories like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, Articlesbase.com, etc..) Years ago this was a worthwhile tactic for link building as well as generating direct traffic from the articles themselves. In 2015 things are different. Now it is nearly worthless for generating traffic directly from the articles themselves because the articles on those sites don't get enough traffic. It is also worthless for SEO (or even causes negative SEO) because Google has reduced the trust level of those sites to zero or below zero and because most of those sites have gone to rel="nofollow" links. The article directories that still allow regular hyperlinks (without rel="nofollow") are more likely to cause you a ranking penalty in Google rather than an improvement in ranking. Article directories are still working for Bing/Yahoo SEO. So those articles can help your site/pages rank higher in Bing and Yahoo, but at the same time, they will be hurting your ranking in Google. And because Google generates 10 times the amount of traffic that Bing and Yahoo do, it simply isn't worth the tradeoff.
Moral of the story = don't use article directories for a promotional tool anymore
Article syndication = (publishing the same article across a number of different places) This can be done in a spammy way or a non-spammy way. If you are writing really high quality articles and publishing them on trusted websites where they are sure to be read by lots of people in your ideal target audience, then yes this is an effective promotional method. It can be good for SEO and it can generate direct traffic. You will likely find it is better for generating direct traffic than it is for helping SEO, but it really depends on the circumstances. If you engage in spammy article syndication where you send one article (either in its original form or after using a spinner to spin the text) then you will very likely cause a ranking demotion for whatever page you are building links for. You may experience a temporary boost in rankings, but the boost in rankings will turn into negative rankings eventually.
Moral of the story = Don't use spammy tactics or even borderline spammy tactics at all for article syndication. If you are going to syndicate articles across multiple sites, only submit it to truly high quality places where there is an active audience who will read the article for sure.
Guest Blogging = (publishing uniquely written articles on blogs for generating links and traffic for your site) This can be done in a spammy way or non-spammy way just like any form of article marketing. The results you will get with guest blogging are similar to the results you will get with most promotional methods. If you end up getting links from low quality places, it is likely to cause a Google ranking demotion at some point. If you are very selective about where you contribute guest blog posts to, then it can be exceptionally effective at generating traffic and exceptionally effective at boosting rankings. Guest blogging is terrific for SEO in Bing and Yahoo pretty much regardless of whether you focus on quality or not.
Moral of the story = Focus on quality not quantity. That will help you rank well in all 3 major search engines. If you are very selective about choosing high quality places to contribute to (usually it is harder to get these opportunity to publish at high quality blogs) then you can experience excellent results. If you try to do mass guest blog posting where you focus on quantity instead of quality, then you are more likely to end up getting your rankings demoted in Google.
