Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

I use article based marketing to promote my business but have found I get better results when I focus them to organizations who have email newsletters (trade associations, professisonal societies and narrowly focused magazines. If you want to talk about how to break into publications, contact me via my profile.

Articles in big article banks aren't as valuable as articles on targeted sites. If you write articles about human resources, and submit them to generic banks, you'll build some backlinks, but won't really generate clients from them. If your ultimate goal is quality backlinks and clients, then go where your clients go online. Submit content for those sites. Offer to guest write a column (or, do it with publications like Frank suggests). When people are searching for expert articles, they might start with a generic search engine, but will quickly go to an authority site that has lots of great other content as well.

In my experience article marketing does still work and especially for more niche markets. You are indeed best served by submitting articles to sector specific content networks, as mentioned above , but only those with relevant and targeted quality content - ideally you should chose those e-zines that have human editing (because they control the quality and effective targeting of articles far better).

Using automated software to submit your articles to a large volume of article sites no longer works.

If your industry lacks quality sector oriented article submission sites, than some very effective sites to submit your content to are ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and squidoo.com. This is especially true for niche markets. Just make sure that you submit original articles and don't duplicate the content across these sites and you will yield the best possible results.

Article submission sites do not always market themselves clearly as such. Marketingprofs.com is to a large extend also an article submission site (and so much more) and marketing professionals could seriously benefit from having their articles published here.

You can just type "Article Directories" in Google and get a bunch of hits for article directories. Also there are many sites and SEO/SEM companies that make their own SEO article list public along with the PR (PageRank) of those directories.

As far as the effectiveness of article submissions, you have to consider the following:

- PR of article directory
- Content and Value of Article

First of all. If you will use article submission for promoting a site of product, make sure that your article is worth reading. Simple submitting articles with a high keyword density in hopes of improving your site (web page) ranking its hard and in my opinion not worh it. Write an interesting article that relates to your site or product and make sure that you strategically use the desired keywords terms in it while writing a quality article.

If you write a quaility article and submitted to a few high PR reputable directories that relate to your business area or product, it can improve your ranking. How much it will help? Well that depends on many variables, but it can certainly help.

Make sure that you read the submission rules and guidelines of the article directory. Must directories have rules and guideline regarding the articles that are submitted. These rules typically prevent you from including a site URL or mentioning a product in the body of the article, but allow you to place 1-3 anchored links in the body. Also they typically allow you to include your site's URL in the article footer (signature) area. If the article breaks these guidelines they will ban your article from the directory.

In my opinion, your goal should be to write a quality article that will not only increase inbound links to your site from directories, but hopefully, generate inbound to your site/article links from readers of your articles.

One thing that I noticed in my article submission campaigns is that when you submit the SAME article to many directories - the Search Engines can recognize the articles as duplicates. So, the SE will only count one or a few as the other additional instances of the article are just duplicates.

Finally, PR and relevancy are also important. If the article directory has a high PR value and it is a specialized directory focusing on your business/producy area (Ex: video games, car racing, etc) -that will be much better than submitting the article to a general directory or low PR directory.

If you need a list of article directory, feel free to request one from me.

Thanks,

Robert
Virtual Kreation, Inc.