Article Syndication for the Average SEO Joe

One of the top free (and sometimes paid) link building techniques is obtaining backlinks through submitting articles to article directories, who allow you a certain amount of hyperlinks in the body of your article or in your About the Author (Resource) Box. Article submission is easy, fast, and vital to any SEO campaign. Here are a few answers to what article submission really is. Note: Article Submission & Article Syndication are interchangeable terms.

Who Submits Articles?

Anyone from an expert, a freelance writer, an SEO marketer (in this case, you), or just about anyone that wants to submit an article they’ve written to get exposure. An expert can be anyone that specializes in that area of work, and has experience and knowledge that they feel that they can offer a specific article directory. A freelance writer is someone who sells their writing services to a company or employer on a short-term basis. In some cases freelance writers could be writing the articles that SEO marketers are submitting, but in more rare cases they are showing off their talents as a writer to get exposure.  An SEO marketer submits articles because he or she wants to get their content all over the World Wide Web with links back to their site in order to increase one’s page rank and keyword rankings in search engines.

Why Submit Articles?

As stated above, your goal as an SEO specialist is to create content all over the web and have it linking back to your site. Article submission is one of the top ways to do this, as each article can have multiple backlinks targeting different keywords. For some less targeted keywords article submission is a great way to rise to the top quickly if you are linking that particular keyword or phrase, but for more competitive keywords article submission doesn’t show immediate gratification. As you are finding out that content is king, you need to keep in mind that putting it on your website is only the first step in maxing out its SEO potential.

Where do I Submit Articles?

The place to submit articles are Article Directories, and they come in all forms. The more prominent article directories are special websites only for article submission, but in other cases they can be found in less traveled parts of a website. For example, Ezinearticles.com is the most used article directory in the world, and the only purpose the website has is to submit articles. Other websites might also be for submitting URLs or they could also be original content sites. Original content sites require that your articles be found only on their website, which is less advantageous to you and your SEO campaign. This is because the search engine would rather see new content on your site than new content on some other site, even if they have backlinks to you.

How do I submit Articles?

Submitting articles is a form of art. Being able to submit articles correctly and in the shortest amount of time takes both experience and practice. To save you time, have your articles in Notepad or another text-only based tool to minimize errors. Start by having 5 Sections: Title, Summary, Article, Resource Box, and finally Tags or Keywords. Setting up your articles in this easy-to-submit fashion, you save yourself boat loads of time, as some manual submitters are still submitting articles in prehistoric fashion (by copying each individual article from the actual page on their site, viewing the source for their keywords, etc.). You also want to watch out for websites that allow you to submit links in your article content that offer an html editor. Because most don’t automatically add line breaks or paragraphs, you have to manually enter the paragraph html strip <p>.

Article submission is a technique every webmaster and SEO specialist should learn, as this can be the easiest way to create a large amount of backlinks to one’s website. My advice – hire high school kids or others that is willing to work for minimum wage to do this unskilled work. Sticking with 2 or 3 different people over the long run to submit your articles helps them gain experience and understanding so after not too long they will be submitting articles faster than the speed of light. Doing it yourself is always an option if you are a small website with a small budget, so don’t think it is a must to have others submit articles. You also might come upon an article submission service that will submit articles at low prices. This is something to be treated with great caution, as one faulty mistake in your service and the search engines will identify you “cheating” and not submitting the content yourself. The consequence is lowering in the search rankings or dropping out altogether.

You might have also heard about the new Google update dealing with content farms, as many article directories were hit hard by this. Don’t let this stop you from submitting articles – just days before I posted this I went on a submission rampage for about 8 hours in 3 days and saw fantastic results days after in the rankings, so despite what others are saying, it still does work.

DISCLAIMER

Warning: Article Submission can be frustrating, as some websites will reject your articles for no apparent reason. Also, an article submission service that “claims” to give you top organic search results can end in a costly manner, as such practices are frowned upon by Google and the other top search engines. If at all possible, either you or someone else MANUALLY submit articles, because the consequence of doing otherwise just isn’t worth it. Although some websites get away with it, Search Engines are getting smarter and more intelligent and are catching more people than ever each day for these practices!