It’s amazing that another month passed, and we are on the verge of spring!

As I said in my last article, we will discuss content. One of the more important things is to make sure you index your content. This leads to publishing and syndication.

One of the first things I want you to do is to ping your website. You can do this by using a free service, such as Pingler. What is great about this service is that it is FREE, and it can provide enough information to help Google find your content! After you do a couple of steps, you will get a free report emailed directly to you.

Now you need to think about submitting articles to directories.

Article indexing

Indexing of your article can take anywhere from a few minutes, to a few days, to a few weeks. It all depends on how often you plan on updating your website and how much time you want to set aside for this marketing effort.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that you index the article you published. A good way to do this is to copy about 10 words from your article and place them in quotes in the Google search bar. If the 10 words come up with your article in the search, you deserve a pat on your back, because Google has indexed your content!

Just because you have your story published does not mean that you can move on to something else. In fact, you need to take to project to the next level.

Specifically, you want to publish the article to a few main article directories. The reason for doing this is to get backlinks, which will result in traffic directly from the article directories.

So the real question is, “What are you talking about?” One directory I am speaking about is EzineArticles. Snoop around the site and things should start to click. Or you can set up an account and submit your articles directly.

Getting into syndication

Now that you have the article published, you want to take it to the next level. Publishing and syndication is huge from a marketing perspective, and it takes you from just publishing on your website to actual syndication.

The first thing you need to do is to find what sites picked up your work. Once you find that out, you will need to contact the webmasters and see if it is possible to provide more articles on the topics that are of interest.

Websites are always looking for more content, and if they are publishing your content, you already have one foot in the door. See if they will take more content from you.

So the next question is, “How do you find your published articles?” It’s easy; just search for it the same way you checked that Google indexed your published article (…10 words from your article and place them in quotes in the Google search bar…).

Using Google Alerts

Another FREE tool to use is Google Alerts. Use the 10 words from your article and set up an alert. Google will let you know via email when your content is published. It’s an automatic way to know when things are moving forward in the syndicated world.

When reaching out to the webmasters, make sure to keep track of who is using your content and who is receptive to working with you. Over time, you will generate a list that will help you syndicate your content, and it can become a large list!

Another avenue to consider it to become a guest contributor or blogger for authoritative websites.

I hope that this article is helpful. Publishing and syndication take time and effort, and can really help your overall SEO. There are lot of tedious steps to take to get published and syndicated, but the investment of time will be well worth the effort.

Next month I will talk about using video to drive traffic to your site, so tune in then.

All the best — and happy marketing!