Modern Street

Article marketing is a great way to give your website a temporary boost in the search engine results pages. Although your articles lose flavor over time, and thus require multiple submissions to be continually effective, they are still one of the best free ways to get referral traffic from your articles, as well as contribute to your overall link popularity.

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.