Why submitting articles can benefit your web optimisation results.

Writing articles, and either submitting them to directories to be published, or allowing them to be downloaded from your own site for reprinting, is known as article syndication. Article syndication allows you to have your article published simultaneously on limitless websites, and can bring a number of benefits to your online business including improved web optimisation results. You usually provide your article for free, with a brief description, and a resource box with links back to your own website which can help your web optimisation efforts.

Here are a few of the ways in which article syndication can benefit your website:

1. It can increase your website’s targeted traffic.

Assuming that the articles you write are valuable and relevant to your website, they can generate a lot of traffic that is already interested in your business. When people read a good article that they find useful, they will often want to visit the author’s site to see if there is more valuable information available there. Catching the interest of visitors before they even arrive at your site should increase the chances that they will buy from you, or sign up to your mailing list when they do visit you.

2. It can increase online awareness of your brand

If you write high quality articles about your website’s niche subject, your business or your name will come to be associated with that niche, and you will become known as an authority in your field. Submitting just a few good articles on a single subject to article directories such as ezinearticles.com can get you expert author status. If customers recognize your name and value the articles that you write, they are more likely to visit your site and buy your products or services.

3. It can get your website indexed by the search engines

If your website, or a certain page of your site, has not already been indexed by the search engines, writing articles can really help to speed up this process. The major search engines visit the most popular article directories every day, and there is a good chance that their spiders will follow links from an article published there back to your webpage which can significantly improve your website optimisation results.

4. It can increase your web ranking

Most web users find websites using search engines, and search engines determine how valuable websites are by the number of other sites that have linked to them. Syndicating your articles can generate a lot of precious back links to your website, as long as the sites that have published them keep your resource box intact. Back links increase in value if they are from a site that the search engines consider to be relevant to your own and will assist your pagerank building strategy. A link from an article that you have written will be seen as highly relevant as it will relate directly to your niche subject, which makes it a very powerful web optimisation strategy!

Potential pitfalls of syndicating your articles

There are a few possible issues you may face with article syndication. The most crucial is that, once you submit your article for publication, you lose control over how it is used. You may find that it is used in a publication which is seen as SPAM, and because your link is included in it, your website will become associated with SPAM as well. Publishers of your article might change it, replace your links with their own, or cut it into pieces.

Another issue with article syndication is that the information in your article may quickly become obsolete, but you will be unable to update it, or remove it from the web. This may damage your online reputation as people will read the article and assume that your knowledge is out of date.

Some people overcome this obstacle by embedding articles in a JavaScript, and just giving third party websites the URL of that JavaScript. This enables you to modify the article whenever you like. Unfortunately very few articles allow you to submit article in this format.

Tips for submitting your articles to directories

• Choose your article directories carefully. It is a good idea to submit to a few of the most popular ones, which also tend to have the strictest rules on how your articles are used. There may also be specialist sites, with articles specifically relating to your niche, and authority sites in your niche may download their articles from these.

• Before you start submitting your articles, it is a good idea to check the policies of the various directories, which can vary greatly. Article directories tend to be particularly concerned with blatant promotion, the use of brand names, and using links in places other than the resource box. Your article will be checked before it is published on the directory, and if it is seen to be too sales oriented, it may well be rejected.

• Another factor to check before you start submitting articles is the format required by the directory. Some are very specific about the formatting, font, layout etc. One example would be the title. Most directories suggest that your title should include your keyword or key phrase near the beginning so that is picked up in searches, but they may reject your article if you then repeat your keyword in the title.

• If you submit an article that you have already published on your website, it may be rejected by the directory as duplicate content. If you submit the article first, and then publish it on your own website, your site may suffer in the search engines due to duplicate content penalties. If you want to publish an article, and submit it as well, you should ideally re-write it to make it as original as possible.

• When you submit an article to a directory, you will have to write a short description of that article. Many web publishers will decide whether to download your article based on that description, so you need to make it compelling and attention grabbing, but also an accurate summary of what the article is about.

• In terms of generating links and traffic, it is more effective to submit an article every couple of days for a month than to submit twenty articles on the same day. Very few publishers will download several articles on a similar subject, and by the same author, on one day. Making regular submissions will ensure that your articles, and therefore your links, stay close to the top of your category, and possibly also appear on the directory’s home page regularly, encouraging search engine spiders.

• Most directories have a limit relating to the number of links you can place in your resource box. While it is great to link to various pages of your website to generate traffic, you may also want to include your URL for customers that would rather input that themselves than follow links.

Writing high quality and informative articles to submit to article directories can be a very powerful way to market your website. Articles can generate interest in your business, and establish you as an expert in your field. They can also help you to get your website indexed, can help achieve search engine positioning improvements, and generate targeted traffic to your site, making it a very powerful web optimisation strategy. Before you begin to submit articles, spend some time choosing your directories, and checking their policies, and you should find the submission process relatively simple.