How To Write Articles For Submission To Article Directories
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Article submission is one of the most effective branches of SEO and a perfect opportunity to get quality backlinks. Writing articles and submitting them to article directories can be good marketing for products and services but it can also be good for a blogger or article writer like me. By submitting an incomplete or question asking article that is closely related to my original content will attract readers to follow my “read more” link which leads to my original article. The submitted article does not only bring me traffic from its readers, it gives me a PageRank boosting backlink from a relevant content-rich source as well.
Why is it important to submit unique and well written articles?
Article submission is a part of your marketing campaign and you should always care about how others find your website. A sloppy written article is never good commercial, it won’t give you any click-troughs’ and it will hurt your reputation.
Articles at the major article directories will most likely be seen in search results. Article directories like ezinearticles.com have all high PageRank´s varying from 4-8 which means that their article mostly are top ranked for their titles. It’s almost impossible for an individual website to compete with these Google favored article directories. That’s why you as a blogger never should submit your original content to them, they will run you over. On the other hand, what would happen if you turned this overwhelming Google favored force into a marketing system of yours? By creating and submitting similar articles with a different but related title, you will wider your “search result funnel” and pick up visitors who formulate their searches in different ways.
Why should I submit my articles manually and not use automatic software?
As you might already know, there are several automatic article submission software’s available online. The software claim that they can submit your article to hundreds of articles in just one single click. It’s no lie, it’s just that you don’t want hundreds of backlinks within hours from pages with same content. These backlinks will do some good for your webpage, but only for a temporary period. When the search engines realize you have been using an automatic mass submitting software (they most likely will), you will regret it.
Google hates mass submitted articles and duplicate content. As soon as they notice that you suddenly have received hundreds of backlinks from article directories, they will deindex all of them. That’s not the end of the story, your site will be punished as well. Getting caught using automatic submission software is an excellent way to get your site blacklisted by Google. The search engines are not the only ones that will punish you for using automatic submission software. First of all, automatic article submitters can only get access to article directories without captcha, and most high ranked directories have captcha. The directories which the automatic submitter can access, do what they can to stop automatic submissions. If the directories suspect that you have been using an automatic submitter, they will reject your request, ban your account and permanently ban your IP from the entire site.
Links from manually submitted articles are given high value by search engines and I’ve already mentioned the other benefits from “white hat” (or “grey hat” to be honest) article submission. What I haven’t mentioned yet is the benefit of being able to choose which article directories to submit to. You see, if it is traffic you want from your submitted articles, it’s important to choose the directories with high PageRank. Articles from automatic article submitter´s do not meet the requirements of these directories and the only way to get through their controls is to create a unique high quality article and submit it manually.
How do I link from my submitted article?
Creating links in articles for submission is like creating links in HTML code. You simply put a tag around it, the line of code looks like this: <a href=”link here”>anchor text here</a>. Most article directories allow you to put your link wherever you like but a good idea could be to refer to your site in the end of the article, in the section called author information or biography. If you’re writing an article with more than about 800 words, the best way for you is to only submit a sample of your article. Then you can link back to your original site with the anchor text “Read more” or something like that. This is against the guidelines of many article directories and some of them might reject your submission because of it. On the other hand, many of them will accept samples with the minimum amount of characters so it’s totally worth a try.
Submitting articles with embedded affiliate links is a way for everyone to earn money without a website. For example if your plan is to sell SEO software, you just write an article related to SEO and refer to your promotion code instead of your website. This technique works fine for some article directories but far from all. If you’re planning to practice this technique, my advice is to use it in a combination with traditional backlinks since there’s no guarantee the links will work.
How to write and format an article for submission?
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Write about something that interests you. This might seem pretty obvious but it is of huge importance. Don’t pick a subject out of the blue just to write “an article”. The more fun you have writing it, the more fun it will be for everyone to read it.
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Have grammar and spelling in mind when writing. A sloppy written article with poor spelling doesn’t look very professional. Remember to always write your article in software with spell and grammar-checking abilities like Microsoft Word. To prevent grammatical errors, a good idea is to always let someone proofread your article before you publish it.
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Don’t make your article look like heavy reading. Remember to use passages and to divide your text with subheadings. Make your text easy to scan by highlighting words and phrases of importance, <b>bold</b> or <i>italic</i>.
Top 10 article directories to submit your articles to
No one of the article directories listed below use the “no follow” command in their "author biography" links. This means they will all give you PageRank boosting backlinks. The more PageRank the article directory has, the more your PageRank will be boosted by your backlinks.
PageRank - Google uses a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set. PageRank is measured on a scale from 0-10, where PR 10 is highest possible.
Alexa Rank - Alexa rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.
| URL | PageRank |
Alexa Rank |
6 |
206 |
|
5 |
1101 |
|
4 |
1902 |
|
www.articledashboard.com*payment required |
5 |
4530 |
4 |
3964 |
|
5 |
177811 |
|
5 |
6025 |
|
5 |
326 |
|
2 |
2536 |
|
4 |
9819 |
*The list is updated 12/7 - 2011
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