Article writing is one of the simplest and most effective SEO methods for promoting your site, but it can sometimes be difficult — especially for a beginner — to decide just when and where to publish your articles. If you follow these straightforward guidelines, however, you'll find its easy to tap into the benefits of SEO article writing.
You're Number One
First and foremost, don't post your best content to ANY article directories. Your most informative, unique and well-written articles belong in just one place... your own site. If you don't already have a blog or discussion board under your own domain name, get one.
You need your most distinctive and useful articles on your own site to encourage other sites (not just search engines) to link to you. Links to your site from other sites (especially other highly ranked pages) make a positive impression on search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc., and will improve your own site's ranking with them.
So keep your best work to yourself. When you write an article that isn't quite as good as you'd like, or doesn't cover any new ground, that's the time to start looking for a good article directory to publish to instead.
Pick the Right SEO Article Directory
Once you decide your article belongs in an article directory and not on your site, make sure you pick the right directory to submit to. If your article is an informative story about an event your company sponsored or participated in, submit it to a news site as a local news item or a business press release. If you've written your article on a particular topic of interest, choose a magazine style article directory that covers that topic.
Make sure the directory you choose will allow you to link back to your site, preferably within the article itself. Many directories, however, add no-follow tags to links within an article so they will not pass pagerank to your own site. In that case, you will want to place links to your site within your author signature file. Make sure you know the link policy in place for each directory you submit to.
Once you've chosen the right directory, submit your article there and ONLY there. You do want to reach LOTS of different outlets with your articles, but if they are simply copies of the same article, Google will only rank one of them. To achieve the maximum SEO benefit, you should provide each directory you submit to with a completely different article.
Top Five Article Directories for SEO
When you search for an outlet to publish your article, remember that much of your SEO benefit is derived from the pagerank that is transferred to your site by the return link to your site. What does this mean? Well... to start, it means that you want to find directories with high pagerank, as they have more "authority" to transfer to your site. Additionally, you will want to make sure they allow do-follow (as opposed to no-follow) links back to your site, preferably within the article itself.
Taking this criteria into account, here is my list of the Top Five Places to Publish SEO Articles;
- Ezine Articles (www.ezinearticles.com) - Pagerank 6/10
- Article Dashboard (www.articledashboard.com) - Pagerank 5/10
- Buzzle (www.buzzle.com) - Pagerank 5/10
- Third Report (www.thirdreport.com) - Pagerank 4/10
- Go Articles (www.goarticles.com) - Pagerank 3/10
This is by no means an exhaustive list, and a good SEO article writing campaign will need to go far beyond just these few sites. These sites do represent a good place to start, though, and should certainly be kept high in the publishing rotation as you continue your SEO article writing efforts.
