Building Website Traffic: Submitting Articles to Directories Improves Search Engine Results


by Terry Heath - Date: 2006-12-20 - Word Count: 560 Share This!

A famous quote from the movie "Field of Dreams" says, "If you build it, they will come." While that may be true for baseball fields (like in the movie), it doesn't seem to hold true for websites. It doesn't matter how great your content is, or how impressive your graphics, the cold hard fact is you're just another of the several billion websites populating the World Wide Web and you're not likely to be anything else until you do a little self promotion.

But unless you have an advertising budget equal to the treasury of a small country, promotion on the web can be sticky business. Adsense ads might be effective, and a banner on a popular website can bring visitors galore, but these are expensive options; for most web publishers, these are not options at all.

Fear not, a new trend in web promotion has emerged with the potential to carry you from obscurity to the top of Google's search page rankings. It's called article submission, and it gives not only the chance to spread your expertise, but you can spread a link to your website as well. The propagation of both these things will bring visitors to your site, and on top of that the increase in links (called backlinks) will improve your search engine standing.

Simply put, you write articles (or have them written for you) on topics related to your website. You submit the articles to websites called article directories, and include a link back to your website at the end of the article. Since these article directories usually have their own traffic, visitors read your article and could follow the link back to your own website. A new patron of your website is born.

Others visit article directories looking for new content to publish on their websites. These web publishers are allowed to use the directory's articles as long as they keep the author's link intact. Now your article has a viral marketing effect; it reaches a whole new audience who might be interested in what your own website has to offer, and they might visit your link.

Even if your article never makes it to another website, you still have your link within the directory. Since article directories generally get high amounts of traffic and contain many links, they can place high in Google page rankings. This increases the value of the link to your site. Not only will you get higher exposure, but the directory's own ranking helps your site do better in the search engines.

It doesn't matter if you've written the article yourself or hire someone to write it for you. As long as the piece is original material, and you own the copyright, most directories will accept your submission. You might also be able to purchase a bundle of private label rights (PLR) articles and rewrite them for submission. The important thing is your content must be original; duplication will hurt your page ranking at Google, and if the content is too common Google could penalize your site and drop your page rankings even further.

So if you've been looking for a free and effective way to promote your website, look no further. If you want to build your website's page ranking at the search engines, here's the answer. Article submission is free, but the exposure it provides is valuable. You might never realize how much so.


Related Tags: article, seo, website, traffic, submission, search engine

Terry Heath lives and writes on the scenic Key Peninsula in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. He operates ArticleArctic.com, an article directory with free submissions and website content.

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