I submitted an article to Ezinearticles and now they rank #2 for the search term I was targetting and I'm still down at #10. How can we make sure this doesn't happen? Any tips?
they have more overall links, so they will outrank you. this is the problem with articles, that many people probably dont understand.
Could the key be not to put the exact keyword phrase in the article title, but only to use it in the anchor text back to one's site?
I've been researching the same area. Out of interest how long was the article on your site before you submitted it? Are you regularly spidered?
I'm spidered almost every day and my orginal version (I submit different articles than the ones I post on my own site) was posted a couple weeks before I submitted to Ezine. It had been spidered already. I think I have figured out the problem. I put the keyword phrase in the title and in my own experience, the most important thing to Google is what's in the title (just my opinion from firsthand experience). I checked an article I submitted on another topic a while back - I hadn't put the keyphrase in the title and this didn't happen.
Why not add 10 more pages just like the one you submitted and have all your articles in the top ten? Most to several different article directories and have your article RULE the SERPs for your keyword. Doesn't sound too bad to me. In the meantime, you'll be getting incoming links from those articles and you'll eventually outrank your articles for those keywords. But until then, I'd submit more articles.