Using Article Submission to Increase Traffic to Your Niche Market Website
There is no doubt in my mind that article submission is a great way to increase traffic to a website. A lot of people say that article submission is a long and tedious venture however, it has been proven over and over again to work like a charm when done properly.
Links are the bullion of internet traffic. The more links pointing to a website the more authority and rank that site will have which directly effects its position in the search engines for the terms being searched. The higher up in the search engines a site is the more traffic it will receive. Obviously moving up to page 300 from page 400 will not yield much more traffic however, once a site starts climbing up to the top ten where the competition is very heavy, every little link counts. Keep in mind that his uphill climb is on a keyword to keyword basis.
Submitting articles to article directories such as Ezine, GoArticles, HubPages, and Squidoo, provides you with the opportunity to build links to your website. Select the keyword you would like to rank for. Now write an effective article using your primary and secondary (cousin) keywords. Do not over saturate your article with unnecessary keywords, just write naturally and make an attempt at being interesting for readers and the related long tail keywords will occur naturally. You should pay special attention to the title of your article. Select a title which will attract any readers attention. Unlike your own website where you need to use the main keyword in the title of the article, keep in mind that the article will reside on a site which most likely already ranks for many keywords and your article will most likely be in a related category listing. Go for an effective, memorable title, if your keyword happens to fit in naturally that’s good, if it doesn’t, don’t sweat it. As long as the article delivers what the title promises you are in good shape.
While writing the article, make sure to use your primary keyword at least once in the first sentence of your article body and possibly once within the last 100 words. Don’t get all whacked out on keyword density, write naturally and stay on topic.
Last but not the least you need to write an effective resource box for your article. You are usually allowed about two sentences about the author and the website you would like to promote. Most directories will allow 2 anchored links in the resource box, use them wisely. If you don’t know what a resource box should look like, just check out some of the other submissions on the directory you are submitting to. You should also consider that many directories do not allow links, anywhere, so you may want to include the URL written out as well. This way if your anchored link gets cut the text version will remain.
The best kind of link you can give yourself is one that uses your keyword as the anchor text, for example… web design, would be a good one for this site.
There are hundreds and hundreds of article directories. Many people will put the same article on a hundred sites expecting to see a hundred links pointing to their site in a few weeks. This tactic used to work but now there are duplicate content penalties which could result in turning your work into a waist of time. Other tactics such as article “spinning” are suspect as well. Article spinning is usually done with an application where you provide two or more versions of each sentence and the application will randomize them to produce 50 or so “unique” articles. These tactics have been used with varying degrees of success depending on who you are talking to. Some claim to have reached the number one spot for their keyword through mass article marketing.
Submitting an article to a hundred directories takes a lot of time which is why there are now many services that have automated the process. These services tend to be somewhat expensive however the claim is that in the long run, if your websites are monetized properly, the benefits far outweigh the monthly subscription. Many of these services will spin your article and send random versions to over 500 directories.
Article marketing services seem to be a great way to get a large amount of links very fast. Article Marketer, Unique Article Wizard, and Jet Submitter are just a few of the services that will distribute your article to hundreds of web sites yielding hundreds of links to your website. These services recommend writing at least one article and submitting to their massive list of article directories every week. Considering that building links to your site is perhaps the most powerful way to attain page authority and gain better ranking in the search engine results pages, these automated services sound like an awesome deal.
The reality though, in my opinion, is that this mass production of articles written only as a vehicle for a link is saturating the internet with crap. Articles written for the Google bot for the sole purpose of getting a link with no regard to being the least bit useful, entertaining, or original. The search engines are on to this as well and we have seen many shoddy directories drop in rank lately due to all the crap articles with perfectly optimized links piling up.
I still believe article marketing is a powerful tool. There are some directories such as Ezine articles which have strict guidelines that must be followed before an article is accepted and the search engines love them for this. Use article marketing wisely and it will work. Taking shortcuts could be detrimental. Write articles for people first then sprinkle in some robot talk to be sure the article works for you. Sure it’s a lot of work but what worth while ventures aren’t these days.
Tags: article marketing, article submission, article submission service, content writing, ezine marketing, Internet Marketing, marketing, site promotion
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