Welcome to the first ever MetaSpring Blog Carnival! Over the last few weeks, we asked our readers to submit their favorite blog posts for inclusion in our new monthly Blog Carnival and we received a ton of great submissions – much thanks to everyone who participated!

For our first Carnival, we thought we’d keep it varied, so the following batch of posts span across the topics of link building, web design and development, social media and search engine optimization. We’ve already started to receive submissions for next month’s carnival (which will focus on web design) – so make sure to submit your post soon!

Design and Development

All the way from Northern Ireland, freelance web designer, Lee Munroe, shares some neat CSS 3 tricks and explains why he thinks Internet Explorer Users Don’t Care About Rounded Corners. It’s a bold statement, but somebody had to say it!

Steve Hamilton of Ann Arbor’s own, Nology Design, sent in a bit of advice for those seeking to build a website in his post, I Need a Website, What Do I Do Now?. Steve stresses the need for in-depth planning and scope definition and provides some noteworthy advice on ROI expectations.

Next up, John Laugherton presents his Top 50 Web Design Resource Blogs. I know – a list of recommended blogs within a list of recommended blogs – how very meta of us!

Another great post from Lee Munroe highlights 21 iPhone integrated websites to get your creative momentum flowing – Web Design Trends: iPhones.

Social Media

Our friend Jason Spector sends in this post entitled, The Twitter Elevator Pitch: Rethinking Your Social Bio. Jason explains how elevator pitches falls short in this world of social media and how your social bio can represent your elevator pitch, personal brand, and more.

Our friends over at Simply Zesty, a social media marketing company in Ireland, discuss the concept of Virtually Dressing for Success. Could avatar dress codes be in our near future?

Jody Fransch broke down the statistics from the September “Did You Know?” video in her post, The Media World Is Changing Fast! The “Did You Know?” series reveals eye-opening internet and tech-related factoids in a short, quirky format.

Writing Effectively

Evan Gould’s cleverly titled post, Five Ways to Write Blog Posts without Writing, offers a few tools and techniques to get you started on that next blog post. That old writer’s block excuse isn’t going to work after reading this.

In the last few years, we’ve heard it over and over – “content is king,” but Larry Brooks, guest author for CopyBlogger thinks that king is dead and a new one has taken the thrown. Why Content is No Longer King (And Who’s Taking His Place) offers insight as to how context usurped the crown.

Patricia F. Anderson, another Ann Arborite, was kind enough to share this post urging you to Link Building

Here’s a vlog from Welly Mulia titled, “Backlink Analysis Using Free Tools“. Welly has documented a few practices to save you time and money when it comes to analyzing your domain’s backlinks. The video is a tad long, but I’ve got some bookmarks for you – he covers the Yahoo! backlink tool from 5:00-13:00, and the SEO Quake Firefox plugin is covered from 13:00-24:00.

Posting guides on eHow is a great way to build links back to your site in a natural, and helpful way – and you can even make a little money in the process. Brian shares his tricks in his guide: Increase SERP Rank on eHow.

Next Month’s Issue: Web Design

Thanks for checking out MetaSpring’s first ever Blog Carnival – be sure to check out next month’s issue on Web Design. If you have a design post you’d like to share, submissions will be accepted through November 15.

If there is a specific theme that you’d like to see covered, email us with your request at media@metaspring.com.

One of the main debates in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) revolves around the type of tactics used to get results – this is the White-hat vs. Black-hat debate.

White-hatters tend to employ a more organic and genuine approach to link building, whereby links are generated through authentic, human relationships. Black-hat SEOers, however, often rely on bots and spammy tactics to derive inbound links and deceive search engine ranking algorithms.

On either side, most of the pros will tell you that one key factor in any good link building campaign is article marketing – the process (or art) of submitting original articles to online directories where they’ll reappear for others to syndicate and ultimately increase traffic back to your site.

With so much dialogue on the topic of article marketing and how it fits into the white-hat vs. black-hat debate, we’ve done our homework and have had the opportunity to put the concepts to work. We’ve learned what works best for us, and more importantly, what SEOers on either side should avoid. In this post, we’d like to share a few of those discoveries with you and let you in on part of our white-hat SEO process – getting your articles listed in directories to achieve maximum exposure.

The WHY of Article Marketing

Article marketing is ultimately a win-win for everyone involved – as the directories grow, they rank higher in search results and see increased traffic; authors gain credibility and see increased traffic, both through the directory and the syndicates who’ve picked up the article; and like authors, syndicates gain a bit of credibility and see increased traffic, too.

The key to all this increased traffic is backlinks. Most directories allow authors to nest links within their articles and since syndicates must copy submission as they are, those links show up on every site that syndicates the article. You get links, the directory gets good, free content, and syndicates get to attract readers to their site, too. Win-win.

The HOW of Article Marketing

Once you’ve got a good article ready for marketing, you must select the most appropriate bundle of sites to submit it to. As all directories cater to a different set of readers and have different review processes, you’ll need to submit your article to at least a few different directories in order to achieve maximum reach.

Additionally, article review time can vary between directories so by submitting to several directories at once, you can extend the exposure cycle of each article.

The WHAT of Article Marketing

Many directories allow authors to submit a few additional details along with their article, usually a summary and resource field. Summaries show up in search results and thus should allow users to make a quick assessment of your piece. Unsurprisingly, a tactfully written, keyword-rich summary will get you noticed more often than not.

Resource fields can really boost link-building exposure by providing authors with a space to enter contact or background information and share links to their website and other resources. This is a great way to gain a few deep-links to your client’s site. For maximum exposure, you should try to tailor these details to fit each directory that you submit to.

The WHERE of Article Marketing

Article directories exist in both all-purpose and niche formats, and can either be free or paid for services – so you’ll need to do a bit homework to figure out which directories are best for your needs. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just be covering a few of the more popular and free all-purpose forums.

EzineArticles

EzineArticles is a leader in article marketing, some of their strong points are:

High Standards – The Ezine editors take the submission process very seriously. They maintain a high editorial standard in their guidelines section, allowing only the best articles to make it through. I’ve actually had to re-submit some of my articles up to five times due to minor discrepancies that the editors caught. There is no room for black-hat marketing in this system.

Expert Status – To ensure that only the best articles get in, authors are limited to eight submissions until reviewers have approved four of their articles. The review process can take up to eight weeks, but once four articles have been accepted – you reach expert status which allows for vastly more submissions. Expert status also gets your articles displayed on the EzineArticles “High Traffic” page – a great bonus for your client and a boost to link-building.

DoFollow Links – When someone republishes your article through EzineArticles, any links that you’ve included in the article are made into “DoFollow” links to help boost your search engine rankings.

Analytics – EzineArticles helps you track where and when your article gets syndicated with a very easy and helpful monitoring processes.

GoArticles

GoArticles is one of the directories that I couldn’t quite figure out. Here’s what I mean:

Maybe I’m just missing something, but if you’ve had any experience with GoArticles – please feel free to share your thoughts and tips in the comments!

ArticleBase

ArticleBase is my personal favorite. When I’m assigned an article to market, I save ArticleBase for last, like a dessert.

Fast, Quality Review – ArticleBase reviews and publishes articles at an amazing rate, while still maintaining high standards. While many of the free submission sites take up to eight weeks to review your article for editorial standards, ArticleBase’s review cycle is usually less than 24 hours.

HTML – ArticleBase outdoes GoArticles in this regard, allowing for much higher level HTML customization. ArticleBase allows three links in the body of the article and another three in the author section. Not many sites are this flexible.

Reach & Audience – As ArticleBase’s FAQ section is proud to announce, their site is growing rapidly. Although I submit articles to many directories, many of the ones that have been syndicated began at ArticleBase. As an added SEO bonus, content from the ArticleBase directory tends to rank pretty well in Google searches.

Analytics – Not many clients would allow you to work through the tedious and lengthy article marketing process without some sort of return on their investment. ArticleBase has great tracking metrics that help determine exposure and linkbuilding success for your client.

Preferences – Many site preferences can be saved, such as bios for each of the authors you set up. These saved preferences mean you spend less time on the busy work and more time optimizing your article.

A Few More Directory Sites We Like

• ArticleDashboard
• ArticleBiz
• ArticleCity

Additional Tips & Tricks

With all that said, we by no means know everything about article marketing, but we strive to keep up to date on the latest helpful hints – we’ve even set up a Google Alert keep us in the loop!

If you’ve got any experience in article marketing, we invite you to share any tips or tricks might have in the comment!