Article Submission Strategy & Best Practices (Whitehat)

So we have created some unique information based articles around a shopping niche, and want to submit them to article based type of sites.. there seem to be so many, which ones are worthwhile and what are the best practices? Here are some questions:

- How many links is reasonable to be included per article - say 500 words, 1000 words or 3000 words article?

- Should a link be pointing back to the home index page at the end of an article or include it as relevant 'anchor text' that points to deeplink page on our site?

- Submitting the same article to more than one site is a good idea or bad? What techniques are usually used here to avoid duplicate content issues?

- Which sites are worth submitting to? We see there is Hubpages, Squidoo and any others? We are paying writers to create quality content, so do we just spin the keywords to vary it and submit to more than one article site or create unique articles for each site? it could get expensive that way, hence the need to know which sites are worthwhile.

- Any other tips or information that would help ?

 

- 3 links per 300 words article looks decent..

- It's always a good idea to link with relevant content whether its home page or a deeplink page

- You can just spin the content little bit and submit to different articles directories

- Ezine articles and go articles are the best article directories. You can expect a high quality backlink as well as loads of quality traffic from these sites..

 

I tend to follow the EZA guidline of 2 links in the footer. Different for the likes of Squidoo which can take a lot more, but when you are looking at 'pure' article directories better safe than sorry. But then I use ArticleBot to auto submit my articles to hundreds of directories so all I do is create an EZA like footer to the article inside the software and hit 'submit'

 

I suggest to always link to the page that makes more sense based on the content and the anchor text, it doesn't mater if it is an internal page or the homepage.

 

If you can get a link, then get it. As long as the search engine spiders will be able to discover the content and the links, then it can only help you.

As a general rule-of-thumb, include no more than 3 links in each article, regardless of how long they are. If you submit an article filled with 16 links, it will probably be declined, or deleted. Instead include at least 1, but no more than 3, links in each article (usually in the author's resource box).

That would depend on the topic/content of the article. Make sure that the links you include are some how relevant to the content of the article. Doing this will not only give you a link, but also help to convert the human visitors who will want to read more on your website.

It's a good idea in general to spread the linking around. You wouldn't want to have all of the links pointing to the home page. Conversely you wouldn't want to have them all pointing to inner pages, and not your home page. Instead spread them around in a logical way. If you are having trouble deciding how to spread them around, then a general guide would be to point 50% of the links to your home page, and 50% of the links to inner pages.

You should always, always, always include a keyword anchor text. Never waste your linking opportunity by putting something silly like "click here" as your anchor text. There is just no reason.

This would probably depend on your overall strategy. The duplicate articles will likely be filtered out over time. If you are wanting each article to rank in the search engines, then I would suggest posting different articles, and not the same article to each directory.

However, if your goal is that the user will simply find your article when they are visiting the article directory, you would probably be just fine using the exact same article. It would depend on how you are planning to accomplish your goals.

Hmmmm..... Don't have duplicate content.

Submit to all of them. I would recommend submitting a unique version of each article to every place you can. Just be sure that once your content is posted that the search engine spiders will be able to crawl the content and discover your links. Otherwise it will be for nothing if the spiders never find your links and content.

There are lots and lots. It would depend on your strategy and what you are trying to accomplish, as well as how your are trying to accomplish it.

One popular method is to distribute your top quality articles to the big, famous article directories, and then use the smaller directories to point links to your other articles (helping them to be indexed and to rank higher). Like I said, it would all depend on what you are wanting to accomplish and how you want to do it (and also how much resources, time and money, you have available).

Probably the biggest pitfall I see is that people give up too quickly. Decide that you are going to do it, and keep at it for a period of time, and don't give up. Most people quit after one week, or even one month, but that really isn't long enough time.

Think of it from a long term perspective - like an investment. I am still getting traffic from articles that have been submitted 3 years ago. So while it took me some time and work up front, I am not enjoying a steady stream of traffic even years later.

If you are doing it to build links, article marketing can be a good way to go. It is also a good source of traffic from human readers (not just search engines) so don't be tempted to produce low quality articles.

Hope this helps,

Neil