If you don't already know, proper article directory submission is an beneficial way to promote your web site and bring traffic to it. Articles are also a good way to bring search engine spiders to your website and get them indexed promptly and gain pagerank.
Are you taking full advantage of this powerful promotion method? Here are three effective tips that have helped create favorable results for me.
Your Article Title:
The most important first step of any new article you are going to submit is to create a good title. You need to make sure your title contains the exact keyword phrase that you are targeting and that the title is completely unique. For example, you are writing an article about “tie dye”. If I go to Google and type in “tie dye” I get back over 5,190,000 results. So I change my keyword phrase to “tie dye pattern instructions” and now I get less than “300,000" search results.
Now why is this so important? Because you want to be able to track your articles once you've submitted them and they are up on the web. You will want to be able to find it easily and track if any links are coming into your website through it. By having a unique and interesting title using a lessor keyword phrase, you to do just that.
Now if you are asking why you need to track the article? That's easy to answer, because if you are not bothering to track your results how do you know what is working?
Tracking articles is extremely powerful for two reasons. First of all, you'll find out what's working. Writing an article and just blindly shotgun blasting it out to the internet is just a rose colored means hoping one of those shotgun pellets hits something worth while.
What you really want to do is watch your articles and see what happens with each one of them. What you will start to see is that some of your topics seem to get picked up the fastest while other ones seem to go no where. What do you do with this knowledge? Write more articles on the topic that works the best and less on the ones that don't.
Secondly, you will gain incoming links from other websites. Let's say that your website seems to go anywhere because no one is visiting it. You write an article and submit it to one of the directories. Soon you start seeing visitors in your website statistics going up and some revenue generated from this site.
You check your website stats and see that a very popular site had picked up your article and sending you about 30 unique visitors a day. This may not sound like much but now you're making about $5 to $7 a day from Adsense because of this new traffic.
If you're a smart webmaster, you will try to form a partnership with this high traffic website so that they continue to send you visitors. One way of doing this is to email the webmaster and have offered to write content for their site that is 100% unique and exclusive for them.
Start researching what sites your articles are showing up on and create a list of potential "link partners". These websites already have show a need for your content and if the site is getting great traffic. Why would you not want to work at a partnership with them and have more visitors sent to your website? Not every webmaster will reply to your request but some will and having a guaranteed one way link back from an established, high traffic website is very valuable.
Your Article Topic:
I've already explained about one way to find out what to write about. See what articles you have submitted already are being successfully picked up by other websites and write more articles on similar topics.
Another good article strategy is to look at your website statistics and find out what keywords are being used in the search engines to find your site. Then research those keywords and find out where you rank in the search engines for them. If you are not in the top 10 results then write an article about that topic and create your self keyword anchor text links in the resource box of your article that link back to the exact page that is showing up in the results (a "deep link").
This will hopefully accomplish two powerful benefits for you. First, it will gain you incoming links to that web page based upon that keyword. This should elevate your page up higher in the search engine rankings.
Secondly, this inward linking should potentially put your article in the top 10 searches for that term, giving you a good second means to get traffic from those search results.
Your Article Resource Box:
The resource box that is included with your article is very important to you. Most authors don't seem to know how to use the resource box properly. Most of the articles you see in the article directories have only the domain name as the link to the website they're promoting.
This is a huge mistake because it is extremely important to create "deep links" to your website to help create a natural linking structure that the search engines like. An easy way to do this is by following the strategy mentioned above by looking at what keyword terms and pages are already getting results.
Here's how I use articles to get traffic to my websites and get noticed, indexed, and ranked by the search engines. Once my website is online and I have manually submitted it to the three major search engines, I write an article relevant to the theme and keywords of the site. In the resource box, the link takes visitors to the domain itself. Such as www.yourwebsite.com. In other words, to the index page.
I write a second article about a month later. This article is linked to the index and my html sitemap. Since you are submitting your article to more than one article directory, you alternate using the index page and the sitemap page in the resource box. Submitting to one directory with the root index page and the next directory with the sitemap. An example would be www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.html.
The third article is when I begin to create "deep links" to the website. These link to the index and an individual web page that has relevant content to the article. An example would be www.yourwebsite.com/tie-dye-shirts.html. Here again, alternate using this link and the index when submitting. If I begin seeing results after the third article, I continue to submit an article monthly for this site with links the index and a "deep link" page.
You will notice that I always link back to the index page. This is very important. You want your index page to be about 60% of what is linked to and about 40% of the links should be "deep links" to individual pages.
Submitting Your Articles to the Article Directories:
Submitting your articles is easy. Each article directory has a link for authors to submit new articles. Follow the link and fill in the required form(s) and submit. There are some politics to this though. Don't submit to all the directories that you can find at one time. Submit your article slowly to 3-5 directories at a time. I usually submit an article weekly to different directories each time.
Create a new article title for each directory. Along with this, make multiple versions of your article and submit a different, unique version to each directory. This will ensure that each directory gets an article that isn't duplicating what is on other article directories. It will also help your website get ranked higher.
What directories to submit to? Here are few good directories to start out with.
http://www.ezinearticles.com http://www.searchwarp.com http://www.goarticles.com http://www.articlefeeder.com http://www.articlealley.com http://www.articlehub.com This is the article strategy I use. It's a good place to start. Remember that the rate you submit the articles needs to be something you can maintain. In other words, you have to keep writing and slowly submitting your articles. Your link growth should be consistent to endure and achieve good rankings.
For most of my websites I only submit one article a month, this allows me to show a consistent link growth to the search engines but not get overwhelmed with writing articles and with article submissions.