If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

If article marketing is one of the ways you promote your Web site then I hope you are using EzineArticles.com because they are hands down the best ezine article site out there. But even as good as they are they don’t always get it right.

On January 21 Chris Knight and the team at EzineArticles launched a new little widget that allows you to copy some code, post it on your Web site, and show your visitors your most recent articles. You can see it in action at Jeff Herring’s blog. Stop. Before you head off to Jeff’s blog, and get sold on this widget read on to find out why it’s a bad idea to install it.

If the idea sounds great to you, your not alone but you also haven’t thought this through far enough or haven’t looked into how the widget works. The truth is that while installing this widget may be easy its counter productive to your efforts. Here’s why.

The best way to drive traffic to your articles is to optimize the article and then send links to it, so that it can gain the best possible search position where people are most likely to find it. When you install EzineArticles widget it may look like you are driving links to your articles, but in reality you aren’t. Due to the code they’re using it appears for the human visitor, but not the search engines. Thus you are robbing your own article of link love. Read on for a better sollution.

If you use WordPress, or any number of other cms/blogging platforms, you probably have an RSS widget that you can install in your sidebar. Go ahead and install that widget. Next go over to EzineArticles and find your member area it will look something like http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=David_Westbrook but of course with your name. Next to your name you’ll find an rss feed button it’s the big red one. Right click the rss button and you’ll get a drop down menu. At the bottom of that menu is a link for properties Click this and you’ll get a little Element Properties window which will tell you the rss feed for your articles’ page it will look something along the lines of this: http://ezinearticles.com/members/rss/David-Westbrook.xml. Copy and past this into your rss widget back on your Web site / blog and you’ll not only be giving your visitors links to your articles on EzineArtilces you’ll also be sending it that oh so needed link love.