I have to ask, since it's something I haven't actively pursued. Let's say I submit one article a day to the top 10 article sites. I modify the article to each site enough so it's not considered duplicate. Assuming all else is equal(I know that's hard because my keywords are important, whether my articles are of good quality, etc), just assume everything else is average, and I'm just submitting one article a day to 10 article sites. How much of an impact would this have after 30 days? After 90 days?
Your modifying of the articles that you distribute is a good idea. If you have very good knowledge in a less than competitive niche (with good demand), then I would say it is effective. I haven't explored it yet myself. Hopefully others will give you feedback.
If you put enough of them out there, on enough sites, people will start copying them and putting them on other sites. A friend of mine, or a mentor rather, put about 100 articles up and a couple months later, he literally could not count the articles anymore. There were too many.
How well does it work traffic wise? I imagine you're getting traffic from other sites that use it, as well as people from the article site. Did they get improved SE traffic?
I posted this in a similar thread.. but don't waste your time submitting your articles. It's no mistake EzineArticles.com is SEO'ed to the max. it's so they reap the rewards of your hard labor and the thousands of people that link to them in posting free aritcles.
I think if you did it consistently over a period of time making sure your not posting the same articles then you will reap benefits of good traffic from it. I have posted a few articles here and there but I have not done it consistently because I get bored with writing. It is very good for affiliate marketing I have heard..
The real problem is that the site getting the most traffic via SERPS is the article aggragator. And believe me, 19 out fo 20 searchers will click on the Google Ads before navigating to your site. All it is good for is for these site's adsense accounts.. There are MUCH better ways to get keyword rich links.
I've submitted a couple of articles and while it's kinda nice to see your work posted out there on the web (provided it gets picked up) I haven't seen a tremendous change in SERPs from it. I am hoping this will change as I submit more articles and hopefully hit my niche, but we'll see.
I heard that short term there will be no effect. It's when you submit an article daily for a few months that you start to see real effects. So I've been told.
i think you should have to develop an interesting article with good stuff with a link for your site to attract the visitor.
in all honesty, I've shied away from article directories because in my mind they are a thing of the past. They are such an old marketing tactic, and you gotta agree with me... the internet has changed a lot since those days. The way I see it, and from the results I've seen, a better tactic is to submit articles to free PR article websites. They are more respectable and are all about getting your news found instead of profiting off of your hard work. I've only done this for my ecommerce websites to announce their openings. For all my other websites I comment on nofollow blogs and forums for backlinks (its faster and easier than writing an article). I also stay away from article directories because in my opinion they pollute the internet with duplicate content, but hey thats just me.
What are "free pr article websites"? Also, I just got my first article accepted at ezine articles. You get an author box at the bottom and you can put a blurb in and leave your link. What is a respectable click through? 10%?? I think I'm heading toward 2% lol, but it's just my first article.
I believe article submissions will really help out our SERPS if you submit enough articles to enough directories. If you only write 1 article and submit to 1 directory you are unlikely to see any change. If you write 100 articles and submit each to 20+ article sites, you will see a major change in your SERPS.
I still do this... In fact, I just took a book I wrote a long time ago (about Microsoft Money) and created 70 or articles... However, despite the fact that I do it, I kind of sense that the people are right when they say it's less effective than it used to be and that it probably doesn't work for highly competitive search terms. I wonder if a better technique might not be to look at which websites recycle material from a particular article directory... and then approach them directly. (I do think that a couple of my best links came from local newspapers that reused articles I posted a long time ago on their web sites.)
I've started using this method to achieve a lot of backlinks with specific anchor texts. what I'm doing is writing 1 article and using jetspinner/jetsubmitter (link in sig - jetspinner is free) to create and send unique versions of this article to 400 article directories. Its very easy to write one 300-500 word article if I know I can generate 400 backlinks from it. Of the 400 backlinks, specific pages from my site are linked to and the tool can rotate through a set of given anchor texts too. This is much more efficient than manually writing 5 versions of 1 article and manually uploading them. It's not as effective as the backlinks from a site like THIS FORUM. But its much easier and less time consuming. If you can write 10 articles per anchor text/keyword, you can get 4000 backlinks. I think its worth the effort. I've just started myself, so it'll take me at least a few weeks to a few months before I can report back how effective the strategy has been. But in theory it makes sense to me.
I think it's a sufficient way to promote your site...But be aware of duplicate content...Rewrite your article and get incoming links...