Summary: Article directories are a great way to get links to your website.
- You don’t need to write original content for each directory
- You can choose your anchor text
- You must make sure your article is relevant to your site
- It’s not advisable to use auto submission software
- Vary your keywords and consider deep linking
So you know you need good links to your site to increase your page rank and trust in Google’s eyes. How can you get these links? Approaching relevant websites is time consuming and has a low success rate. Paying for links is a no-go. Are there any other options?
A great way to get links to your site with the right anchor text is to use article websites. These websites accept submissions of articles from authors anywhere in the world. You’ll see that the page rank of article websites is often quite high – most are between 4 and 6. So it’s a good way to gain quality links with anchor text that you choose.
Usually the articles you submit are reviewed before they are published to ensure they are good quality content. But on the whole, if you’re submitting to a lot of article websites, you don’t need to write loads of different articles – you can submit the same article to all the directories, as long as it’s your original work.
You need to keep your article relevant and on topic. Why? See the article on link relevance, authority and trust – which explains that links from relevant websites (and pages) are more valuable to you than links from random sites/pages with unrelated content.
A word of caution
Be careful when planning your strategy with article websites – if you successfully obtain a number of links to your site with the same keywords all in one go, the search engines may see this as manipulative behaviour (mistaking it for buying links, for example).
Also be aware that it’s possible Google may have disabled the value of these sites in passing page rank. There’s no way of us knowing – but there’s certainly no harm in obtaining links this way, Google and other search engines will not treat them negatively. Don’t forget, in addition, that boosting your page rank isn’t the only value of such links – you’ll see some traffic and you’ll also help search engines to find your content. So linking to new content using article sites will help it get crawled faster.
Should I use auto submission software?
My experience with this software is that it does not usually work with the list of article directories that I’m interested in submitting to (i.e. the list below). Instead a lot of the directories it works with seem spammy and have a low PR value / low Alexa traffic rank.
I would guess that it doesn’t work with many of the above list because each site I submit to asks you to categorise your article using different category lists, and asks for slightly different information (a ‘teaser’, ‘keywords’ etc). I think this list represents the best of the article sites that I know of in terms of quality.
Also, it’s not ideal targeting a single keyword across all article sites. It’s better to plan a good link building campaign which includes deep links to other pages of your site – links to other content on your site, besides your home page. Target a selection of key words or phrases, different for each page you’re linking to. This will help your linking campaign appear more ‘natural’ in the eyes of the search engines.
Personally I’d recommend submitting your articles one by one – it may take a little longer but you’re more likely to have your articles accepted. You can also hand pick the best article directories which are likely to have more trust in terms of their value for link building. If you have a different experience with auto submission software, I’d love to hear about it.
Which article directories should I use?
Here’s a list of article directories that we’ve used successfully. A lot of these have a good page rank of 4-6 so provide valuable links to your website. If you have any more suggestions for this list or you’ve had any problems using any of these sites, please add comments!
- www.articlealley.com
- www.amazines.com
- www.articleblast.com
- www.articlecity.com
- www.articleclick.com
- www.articledashboard.com
- www.articlesbase.com
- www.articlesphere.com
- www.bestmanagementarticles.com
- www.buzzle.com
- www.goarticles.com
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