Will writing and submitting articles help promote my site?

[whiz]

Uhm, I need some advise. I read about this somewhere, that articles can effectively promote my website. Is this worth spending time on? I kinda need opinions from anybody who had experiences on submitting in article directories and how it affected their site. Thanks.

[GRex]

It does, but you have to keep in mind that's it only contribute to search engine ranking in the long term. Don't expect superb result any time soon.

The serious drawback is having to submit to hundreds upon hundreds to articles sites manually. If you choose to submit to only a few, that's up to you.

Another concern is when the same article appears on too many different places, we can't be sure it won't be penalized by search engines.

[whiz]

How high is the risk of being penalized? Glad I only started submitting on 10'ish directories.. So articles are a no-no now? Guess I'm returning to web directories and link partners..

[GRex]

Don't mean to freak you out. I'd continue submitting articles if I were you.

I personally can't tell how serious is such penalty. SEO experts in the house might be able to shed some light.

[whiz]

So I'll still submit.. Planning 100+ article directories :cheesy:. I guess having same content on different directories won't penalize that much? (or would it..?)

[aboyd]

How high is the risk of being penalized? Glad I only started submitting on 10'ish directories.. So articles are a no-no now?

I'm not sure "penalized" is the right word. Perhaps "ignored" is better. Google doesn't want duplicate content in its index, so it tries to figure out which site holds the original text.

You can see this clearly with the case of DMOZ. The DMOZ link directory (and Google's "powered by DMOZ" pages) do OK in the search results. However, the thousands & thousands of sites that mirror DMOZ basically don't even appear in search results. Same thing with Wikipedia. Articles on Wikipedia rank quite high in Google's search results. But the thousands of mirror sites don't appear at all.

Google will try to do this with your article. It will see that the same article appears on 20 sites, and it will decide upon a "victor" to retain PageRank. The other 19 sites will not rank well or at all for that article. Note that I don't believe the sites gethurt -- Google does not blacklist them or apply a negative score to the other pages on the sites. It simply ignores the duplicate page.

What this means is that, if you want a decent strategy that saves time, you'll probably only bother with the top, high-traffic article sites. Get that article into maybe the top 5, and hope you get high PageRank from one, and a bit of traffic from the others. There wouldn't be much reason to bother with a no-name article repository, because you don't want some low-PR site to be Google's "victor," thus relegating your article to bad search results. And you won't get traffic from those sites, anyway.

Articles work. But past a certain point, don't expect a lot of PageRank. So only submit to the best (which also has the nice side-benefit of saving you time chasing diminishing returns).

-Tony

[dojo]

I have written some articles and posted them. Then I realised I'm wasing my unique content and put it in the sites that are reprinting same articles again and again. I got few visits this way and waste some great articles.

Now, I just focus on posting in forums and building my own content. And I start have less respect for those article sites that just copy-paste articles from other similar places

[euk-roger]

I think for more information please visit the link below :
http://www.guaranteed-ads.com/promotearticles.html

[cscgal]

Submitting articles to various sites in your industry with your website address in the credits can definitely not only help your search engine ranking, but get you some targeted visitors, credibility, and contacts. A good article will also earn you respect in your field.

[SEOiscool]

Writing quality articles is always a plus to your site, even if you dont submit them to article directories- and even if you do please remember to keep to the major ones and/or the ones related to your niche market.

Even if you dont submit them to article directories and just post them in your site, that is also a way to help you rank best in S.E.´s as it will provide your site with good content that is, above all, original ;)

[weblaunch]

Having written lots of articles to promote my sites, I'd have to say "Yes!". Articles help drive traffic to your site through direct referrals (through your resource box) and by improving your link popularity. The higher the quality of your article, the more direct traffic you can expect from people reading your article. Higher quality articles are also more likely to be picked up by more article directories and other web publishers, so quality is also important from an SEO standpoint.

[cscgal]

I agree, syndication is key. What is a "resource box" or is that just a metaphor?

[jmorty732]

It does, but you have to keep in mind that's it only contribute to search engine ranking in the long term. Don't expect superb result any time soon. The serious drawback is having to submit to hundreds upon hundreds to articles sites manually. If you choose to submit to only a few, that's up to you. Another concern is when the same article appears on too many different places, we can't be sure it won't be penalized by search engines.

I dont't want to sound like a smarty pants, but this will only happen if you include the articles that you are submitting on your web site. Creating different articles for article submission, and then different ones for your web site may be a strategy that you want to consider.

Morty

[cscgal]

If you do that, your first instinct might be to post good articles on your site and crappy articles on other people's sites. I mean, why spend the time giving THEM nice spiderable unique content? The thing is that if you do that, your name and reputation, and your website's reputation, become associated with the crappy articles all the same. So post good quality articles you don't mind having your name on everywhere, but do save the absolute best for yourself.

[jmorty732]

If you do that, your first instinct might be to post good articles on your site and crappy articles on other people's sites. I mean, why spend the time giving THEM nice spiderable unique content? The thing is that if you do that, your name and reputation, and your website's reputation, become associated with the crappy articles all the same. So post good quality articles you don't mind having your name on everywhere, but do save the absolute best for yourself.

I agree 100%. I didn't mean to imply that you should just post any old thing. These articles should be good quality articles.

In regards to why do it, it really depends on each individual site. It makes complete sense in some situations and none in others. For example, a local retail store going online for the first time. Their strategy may be to provide their customers with valuable information in areas related to their product line. In this case they might want to use article syndication to establish some links on the net, plus make more of a "name" for themselves as providing expert information.

The article syndication can really be a no brainer if the store has published previous newsletters, phamplets for their customers. They can take this content and convert it into syndicated articles to get more visibility for their store, and then use the content fromnew newsletters on their web site.

One strategy that has worked very well for some of my clients is to do the following: Write 2 articles for a "topic area". The first should cover the basics and answer the question of "why should I care" about the topic area. Note, the first article needs to be interesting and provide value (not the typical "intro to blue widgets"). The second article should get into the nitty gritty of the topic and cover specifics (such results of using blue widgets, visual examples,etc)
The first article gets posted to syndication and links to your web site where the second article is posted. This provides a nice flow for people interested in your topic. Obviously the success of this depends on the topic and overall interest in the topic.

BTW, I could have sworn I posted this reply before, but for some reason it doesn't look like it took (probably my bad) so I apologize if this comes up as a duplicate post.

[weblaunch]

What is a "resource box" or is that just a metaphor?

A resource box is a brief promotional message (aka "about the author") appended to the end of the article. It is equivalent to a signature on forum postings.

[010081]

yea this is the best man go for it

[JeffHeaton]

I've had very good luck with articles. They generate a fair amount of traffic when they are first published, and often generate traffic when others look for them. Plus the money the site pays for the article is nice too.

Isn't it usually against the contract to submit your article to more than one? The contract I sign when the editor and I agree on a topic states that they own the article for a set amount of time usually.

I write about software development mostly. The sites I use for articles are devx.com, informit.com, developer.com, gamelan.com.

[tmark938]

I use articles websites on a regular basis, and while this is a long-term strategy, it can be very successful.

I have many articles which I wrote months ago, which are still attracting views, and people ARE visiting my websites.

I think that the trick with these kind of sites is to make your article headlines stand out - be different, be adventurous.

Good luck.

MB

[weirfire]

Another massive benefit of having articles written for your site is that you can submit them for review by sites such as digg.com and shoutwire.com These sites can send thousands of visitors to your site within a week and can be very lucrative for those with PPC advertising. We produce articles for many of our clients who spend most of their time just digging the articles we've produced for them. If you get lucky with digg and produce something interesting it's been known to send 30,000 unique visitors your way in 1 week.