Really dumb question on using articles for backlinks

I am just starting to use articles to build backlinks to my sites and there are one or two questions/areas I am just trying to fully grasp in my mind before doing it. I am not so much trying to do affiliate marketing with the articles..just want to build some backlinks i guess...

If someone could please confirm my understanding on these areas (or correct me) it would be awesome:

1)When using articles for the purpose of building backlinks (not for actual marketing) you do NOT and actually should not use an article that relates to your topic because you do want to have to actually compete against your own article in the rankings. So you could put up an article on cancer even though you are building a backlink to your site on marketing?
The links to your site should be at the very end of the article and possibly even in a resource box if available....not in the actual body?

2)When entering your links/anchor text you want some to be your target keyword or phrase, some variations of it, and some that are not targeted (like simply click here) so maybe a 50%, 30%, 20% ratio??


I know these are basic and stupid...but I dont want to put a lot of effort into doing things one way and screw myself by doing them wrong...lol

1) No... backlinks are worth more if they come from relevant pages so writing an on topic article helps. Just target longer tail keywords that don't directly compete. Who knows, you might even get some free traffic clicking through.

2) I usually use my 1 anchor text the majority of the time and then rotate through a few others and now and again.

Correction

1. No, you do certainly want it to be related because the relation of the content surrounding the links are counted in the link weight it will give you in relation to your anchor text.

How much competition it plays against your own site will depend largely on how you decide to build or distribute links to those articles. If you are not doing anything like that, then you have nothing to worry about. Remember that the related content of all the articles is linking to YOUR site. It is your site that then has 100s if not 1000s of links going to it. It's going to out rank all the others.

If however your site sucks so badly and has so little trust for some reason (very unlikely because of the reasons I stated above), that one of them should rise to the top, then you are assured that whatever traffic was gained, your link is there for them to follow through on getting more.

You want it in the body so that when/if someone picks it up to use on their site, you get the link. A lot of people who pickup articles from the major dir strip the infobox portion.

2. Do not use click here. Certainly anchor the target terms you want as links. Most of the dir have some set rule of 3-4 per article max. Sometimes only one.

Finally my best advice, go do it, track your results, and find out for yourself what works best. I think I have helped you at least avert some disaster though.

Thanks you two. That helps A LOT! I'm ready to go now!

Good to see bhw members helped solve your query

Its a great forum indeed !!