SEO-Recap – Article Submissions

Next to directory submissions, the most popular way of securing one-way links is article submissions. There are literally thousands of article directories across the web. The proliferation of these article directories began originally as a way to share infomration, and for non-published writers to gain a chance fo online publication as a stepping stone to being a recognized authority.

Of course, Google’s algorithm eventually looked on this content as valuable and started counting links frm such directories as valuable in turn to your website. As usual, the SEO industry tried to make use of every opportunity to promote websites online, and this led to some abuses of the system which you should avoind if you want success with article submissions.

Article directories have typically always offered fere membership, and attracted many authors to contribute in their website. As traffic to these directories increased, more people gained information and added their own. The article directories benifited by selling ad space to early web advertisers, and therefore were perfectly positioned for the next big thing to come down the pike – Google AdSense.

Google serves contextual ads in websites that partner with them. Since they require more and more web pages to display their ads, article directories are provide them with the ad networks. Similar ad networks also buy space, such as  Yahoo, Adbrite, etc. Search engines in general and Google in particular find fresh content to be valuable, and that is what search engines get from these directories. The combination of article submission sites and contextual ad networks is one of the reasons why there are so many new article submission sites appearing daily.

The SEO industry manages to take full advantage of this scenario:  Since contextual ad networks need lot of web pages to serve their ads  and article directories provide them with all the space needed by the ad networks, the opportunity exists to benefit by tapping into the perceived value of directories. Websites need links, and article directories give free one-way links to these websites since the article sites need lot of content to increase their revenue. Therefore, website owners give free content to these sites to get their one-way links, and the advertisers pay the directories for ads to appear next to all the content. Articles appear in search, and everyone is benefited.

This is one of the best models existing on the web today, because here every one wins and everyone gets what they want. However, article directories also need good links and traffic to be successful in this model. This means that as a website owner, your article submissions should be valuable to the directory – relevant, keyword optimized for search, and well written.

You should also start with higher PageRank when it comes to article directories – there are some with PR6 – 7, and these are the highly successful online article directories.Of course, their success depends on the quality of their content, so expect to learn the ropes and submit only high quality content – not ‘spun’ articles or ‘overstuffed with keywords’.