Writing for and submitting your articles to various online article directories accomplishes several things. One, it gives you a venue to publish your work. Two, it provides content that may well get picked up and redistributed on other sites, increasing your exposure. And three, it can be a source of valuable backlink juice for your website.
There’s the old internet adage that “content is king”, and by publishing new, fresh, original content that links back to your site, you guarantee a steady stream of good, positive link juice to help increase your visibility and page rank in the eyes of the various search engines.
So what are the ins and outs of article directories and publishing? We’ll go step by step.
Article directories are just what they sound like, online repositories of articles on various subjects from a wide variety of authors and sources. Articles are usually categorized and sub-categorized to make locating them much easier. Most article directories do not pay for their content, but many will exercise some level of discernment and qualification to make sure said content is original and not published on any other site. Ezine and Buzzle are two of the pickiest article directories when it comes to duplicate content. Duplicate content or plagiarism are two of the biggest reasons that authors are banned from posting on a given directory.
Of course you can include links in your author’s box or resource box that are ideal for website and search engine optimization. You may also include target keywords so that people can get to your articles from your site and vice versa.
The obvious benefit of writing a lot of articles is that you become identified as an expert in a given field.
The more articles you publish on a variety of quality directories results in high quality backlinks to your sites.
Remember that the primary purpose of your articles is to help people, not sell your services. With that in mind, write articles on subjects that will have the widest possible appeal. Be sure to craft an appealing, eye catching title, utilizing relevant keywords both in the title and near the beginning of the article for search engine purposes.
When choosing an article directory, make sure that their links are “do follow” meaning they will get indexed by search engine ‘bots and provide the all important link juice. “No follow” links are pretty much worthless, with rare exceptions. This author routinely posts on Articlesbase, which is no follow, but is a very good source for having articles picked up for redistribution, which does provide a good number of quality backlinks. Again, go with what works best for you.
You can go online and Google “do follow article directories” for a complete list of all such directories. Try to choose a number of different sources to post to, basing them not only on “do follow” status but also the page rank of the directory itself. A higher page rank (1 being the lowest) is always a benefit.
Of course some of this process is trial and error. Pick the directories that work well for you (I’m particularly fond of Ezine and Articlesbase) and post your articles accordingly.
Best of luck to you and your work.
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