Article Submission For Web Site Promotion
Web Site Owners or webmasters write articles and distribute them on the web for different reasons. It could be to enhance their professional online reputations, get the word out about their business, bring in traffic to their website or to improve their Search Engine Rankings.
Is article submission the magic bullet all marketers are looking for?
I don’t think so, but that doesn’t mean it’s not something you should take a little bit of time to work on. Before you dive in and start submitting your article to every article directory you can find on the internet. There are some things you may want consider such as:
1. If you write a less than professional article it may show your business in a poor light.
Taking the time to produce a well written, accurate article allows you to appear to be a professional in the field your writing about. This in turn gives website owners who may be looking for a little extra content for their site more of a reason to use your article. It may seem like common sense but be sure to run both a Spell and Grammar check before you submit.
2. There are only 10 – 20 article directories that will drive any traffic to your site.
So there’s not much need to submit to every article site. I am, however, a firm believer that every link is a possible good link, sometimes you need to perform marketing triage and just get the link out there. If you have the time to submit to hundreds of directories it really can’t hurt you but the majority of them you’ll be wasting your time with. Now you ask what directories are worth my time then? I’d say go with the ones that Google tells you it already likes by searching for – article directory.
3. There is no way to be sure everyone that uses your articles will keep the links back to your site intact.
This is just one of the facts of article publishing that you have to accept. I imagine you could keep searching for your article day after day finding the people who didn’t link back to you, researching their website to find contact information then sending them an email or letter and hoping that it’s a legitimate contact address and that they will take it down. But truthfully your marketing time and brain power would be better served if you took that same amount of time and wrote your next article, submitted it and picked up a few new links.
4. In general the quality of the inbound links is less than spectacular with many of the linking pages appearing to be on new sites with little or no page rank.
This once again goes to my belief that every link is a potential good link and no inbound link especially a keyword link from an article is bad. You never know which one of those sites that is now new and has a low page rank will be the next big thing. Even if it never becomes huge as that owner promotes his or her site your article in turn gets some additional promotion which in the end gives you more visitors.
5. Your articles should not be considered just for back links.
With a few well written articles focused on some long tail search keywords you can more easily knock your competitors out of the rankings for those searches. They should also be seen as “traffic bait” an additional way to drive even more traffic to your website.
6. Take the time to change your article a “little” with each submission.
The general consensus in the Internet Marketing World is that the major search engines use what’s called a “Duplicate Content Filter”. What this filter does is look for the same page on many sites and then starts downgrading the ranking for each duplicate thereby limiting your exposure. You don’t need to completely re-write your article but to get the full effect of a successful article marketing campaign you may want to take the time to change up approximately 20% of your original article for the directories and if you’re going to put a copy on your site I’d do closer to a 50% change on the one.
Really all-in-all article submission has its place in the overall internet marketing scheme and as long as you follow the steps above you should be successful at it. Just remember it’s not the magic bullet or the end all be all to get your site ranked but it can help and what marketer can’t use a little additional help.