Top Tips On Article Submission
13 December 2010 By Northern Lights
Fraser Mitchell of Siteseeing, a very practical web design and search engine optimisation company, has written a guest blog for us on article syndication.
Top Tips On Article Submission
Writing and syndicating quality articles can be an excellent way to build your personal profile, or the profile of your business, establishing you as an expert in your industry.
Through the use of RSS and by building links into either the article itself and/or your personal biography, you can also increase traffic to your website.
One point to note here is that in most cases, although you will be able to create links in your article and biography, they will have the “nofollow” attribute. This simply means that although readers will be able to click the link, search engines will not be able follow it, making it worthless for link building campaigns, which are a vital part of Search Engine Optimisation Purposes (SEO).
Article writing and syndication can prove to be a time consuming practice, so here are 5 helpful tips to speed up the process.
Find a list of article directories, which are either most relevant to your industry, or have a high page rank, and bookmark them for future reference. This way when you write your next article you can find them easily. See the Top 50 Article Directories by traffic for an idea of these and this list
Follow the basic editorial guidelines. Your article must not be an advert for your business, or it will be considered as spam and rejected. Make it a minimum of 250 words, but keep it punchy and interesting. Do not be afraid of being controversial and creating debate, providing you can support your argument in a reasonable manner or with facts.
Create a registration template. Before submitting an article for the first time, you will need to register with the website. The registration information tends to be the same in all cases, so have it on a document, ready to copy and paste into the forms.
Create article templates. In addition to the article itself, you will need an article title, (which must not be in BLOCK CAPITALS), a summary which should be a maximum of 500 characters, and your personal biography.
In most cases to create links in either your article or your biography, you will need to insert some simple html code.
In the example above, “keyword” would be the word the reader would click in order to reach your website.
Since this is quite painstaking to do each time and as some directories do not allow you to insert links into the body of the article, create two versions of it, one with the html links and one without. This way you will just need to copy and paste the relevant version into the form.
Choose relevant keywords. You will be asked to add keywords to your entry, which will help users find your article on the website. Make them relevant to the article itself and not to your business. If you use inappropriate keywords this will be considered as spam and your entry will be rejected. Include your keyword list at the bottom of your article template so that you can copy and paste this as well.
The very first time you submit an article will be the most time consuming, as you will have to complete the registration forms. However, once this has been done, the process becomes much easier, with the majority of time being at the front end, writing the article itself and inserting the html code into the second version. Once this is done, following the top 5 tips above, you will simply be copy and pasting. Submitting an article to 25 directories per month will then only take an hour or so.
One final point, use an analytics package to check which sites are not producing traffic and replace them with others, until you have a strong list, which will make the ultimate use of your time.
Useful links
