Previously, the longest I have ever waited was 7 days. And when I write to them and ask why, I would always get a prompt reply back in a day or two. But then, I’m talking about the situation 2 years ago. Nowadays, they don’t reply (at least most of the time). Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to wait 10 (or more) days before your article is approved!

In article marketing, EzineArticles is no doubt one of the top destinations, and probably the first port of call of any writer or submitter. If you’re submitting an article to a number of article directories, I’m willing to bet EzineArticles is one of them, each and every time.

In fact, some people recommend that you submit your article first to EzineArticles, and then only to the others. Ok, this only applies if you intend to submit the SAME article to several of the top article directories. The reason being that, it seems Google likes EzineArticles because of its established age, and relatively strict quality control all along.

EzineArticles just does not simply approve articles, or at least that is what they state on their site.

So if your article doesn’t follow their guidelines, they’ll usually send you a reminder to correct it. But my article was just held up the editorial queue for days, and writing to them asking why just drew a non response. Nope, not a single reply.

I’m not one of those mass submitters who go by “more is better” and dump a ton of articles that are written by some outsourced writer on EzineArticles. Recently, I decided to submit a couple of articles I myself wrote, to them. Now, I haven’t submitted articles to them in quite a while, and 10 days of waiting is the longest I’ve waited; it looks like the norm now. Previously, 5 days would be about normal. Also, it’s probably the norm for EzineArticles not to respond to emails these days, apparently. So I wonder, is EzineArticles on the decline? Could it be related to the ever increasing load of articles being submitted to them?

I shudder to think.

I’d like to add that, if your article keeps getting rejected for “breaching the editorial guidelines,” it’s best to just comply. It’s tough luck if the editor you’ve been assigned to is some gung ho editor. That’s because EzineArticles employs many editors; the result is many articles that would not have made the cut, do so, while others that would, don’t.

It is a shame really, because Chris Knight’s EzineArticles was one of the best, and most trusted article directories out there, all this while. Can’t also really blame them when you consider the amount of articles they get each day.

I still hope it EzineArticles will continue to one of the best article directories out there. OK, rant over.

The best sites for article submission (in my opinion) are:

• EzineArticles
• GoArticles
• ArticleCity
• ArticleDashboard

Here are some tips for writing effective articles that get published. Take note, that if you write poorly written articles, they will not get published (by the majority of article directories) neither will they be used by other people on their sites even if they do get published, thus depriving you of any potential links you could have had.

• Research what you intend to write about, and build up a list of keywords, with a main keyword and other supporting keywords. Note the LSI factor, and whether it is a keyword that gets searched or not. Obviously, if the keyword gets no searches, it is more than likely to be a futile exercise.
• Build your article around your main keyword ( have a keyword density of no more than 2% ) and work in the other supporting keywords in all the paragraphs.
• Don’t worry too much about spelling or grammer at first. Draft your article first, and ideally, keep it to something around 400-600 words. Longer articles are also okay, but don’t get quite as much sustained reader attention as shorter ones.
• Write as though you were talking to someone and getting them to comprehand. More info in my post here. When you’re done, paste the article into MS Word, and correct any spelling errors/grammer errors. MS Word of course provides spell checking and word counting tools.
• Make sure you construct a proper header than grabs attention without sounding spammy or sales-like. Your main keyword should be ideally inside the header text as well. A good headline is invaluable in arousing reader attention, so get your headline right!
• Add just 2 links in your article (linking back to your site). One in the last paragraph, and the other one in your resource box (author bio). Make sure the one in your resource box is a proper URL, while the one in your article body is a text link. Don’t put more links than that, or your article may get rejected. Some article driectories only allow one link, so make sure your URL shows in the resource box at the very least.
• Avoid being spammy, nothing annoys readers more than a sales copy, no matter how sugar coated it is, and avoids getting your article rejected by the article directories. Just write as honestly as you can, and make it informative and useful; not a padded bunch of words that are just mainly filler word fluff.
• Don’t use the same article for the many directories; rather submit different articles to different article directories as far as possible in order to avoid duplicate content penalties. Stick to a few tried and tested article directories and try to avoid using article submission software. More is not better.

These bunch of steps can go a long way to getting your articles accepted in the article directories and help you in writing better articles, which eventually get published at different sites/pages all across the web. Try them out, and see if they work to place your articles higher in the SERPs and get more traffic to your site.

I also notice people who are good speakers make poor writers and good writers make poor speakers, in general. How true is this anyway? Than there are those who are good at both, although it’s not very often you come across them.

Here are a few writing tips I have learnt along the way that others may find useful:

“Write your stuff as if you were talking to someone.”

It’s usually easier for most people to talk to a friend than to a stranger. It’s easier to talk to one person than it is to talk to a crowd. And it’s easiest to talk to yourself than it is to talk to anyone.

A good practice is to imagine or visualize several “personalities” and then conduct a dialogue with them. Write a draft that addresses that personality by name, and then go on to tell him/her what you want to say. Rinse the draft a few times, if need be.

“It need not be understandable to all; one person will do.”

I feel there’s meat in that statement. Many times, writers agonize over how to mould their writing to be as understandable to as many readers as possible, when actually they just need to to focus on getting one person to understand. Make it understandable for one reader and the rest will follow.

“Personal experience is always powerful for others to read.”

Bloggers generally command a higher percentage of Web traffic over traditional old school websites because people want to read about their experiences; and of course, nothing beats personal experience. Drawings from personal experience are always easily recognizable, and puts UPP (Unique Personal Perspective) into your blog.

You’ll most likely spot those three statements demonstrated in some form or another on many a great site or blog. There are loads of other writing tips out there that could fill an entire book, but that’s for another day. I hope you found these three nifty.

The way search engines understand articles is vastly different from us humans. You might take a sentence like this :

“The sound of silence was so oppressive, a pin dropping down would have been like thunder magnified several fold. In the depths of the room, nothing moved.”

I just made that up… We know that sounds like a silent room, but to a search engine, it means nothing. Basically, a search engine is only concerned about keywords.

Search engines count the number of times a keyword appears in an article to determine what it is about. So if your article is about scrabble, then of course the word scrabble should appear in your article more times than any other word there. The number of times a word appears in your article is called keyword density.

Example

A scrabble article with 300 words that mentions “scrabble” 3 times in the article has a keyword density of 1%.

Where should you place your keywords?

The best places should be:

• Header/title
• First paragraph
• Last paragraph

Also sprinke a few keywords somewhere in between the first and last paragraph. Try aiming for a keyword density of about 2 percent or slightly less and you should be okay.

I must remind you – do not pepper your article with keywords until it has a high keyword density, as not only it doesn’t work, it will actually downgrade your article with the big search engines. Always strive to keep it as natural as you can. A keyword density of 1-2 percent is good enough.

Recent improvements to search engine understanding of keywords in a technology called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) has been adopted by Google, making it ever harder to fake your articles. So write your articles with the search engines in mind, but remember to keep them real always. Natural to both humans and search engines.

Many a time, it’s the simplest methods that work the best.