How many article directories to post to

[Ghostgen]

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Hi All

I have been lurking around the forums on and off for about three years now, but I am still on the 'should I or shouldn't I give this ago?' state of mind. Having said that, I have bought two domain names in an area that I enjoy and am pretty knowledgeable about, so I am getting closer and closer.

Right, enough waffle..I am trying to devise a marketing strategy for my site(s) focusing solely on unpaid SEO. My question is this. When you write an article for the purpose of submitting to the Article Directories to gain some back links, how many directories to you submit it to? I am not interested in any of these 'pay us £100 and we will submit your article to a million directories overnight' type schemes and I am prepared to put in the hard work of submitting to the right kind of quality sites. But how many decent dofollow article sites do I need to be hitting to take an effect?


Cheers

Matt

[MollyHunter]

Hi Matt

The best thing to do with articles you write is spin them and submit them to as many as you can. By spinning your article each one you publish will be unique and you'll get far more benefit from it.

If your not going to spin your article, submit to mybe 5 I'd say, then submit your next article to a different 5 and so on and so forth.

[Ghostgen]

I am glad you replied Molly, I have been reading your blog, I like the sound of a lot of your ideas.

I did have a look at that article rewrite software you mention. I think I need to play around with the settings a bit more as after a practice one I had written had been rewritten about three times it made very little sense.

I have looked at blog commenting to but all of the big ones in my area have nofollow in the comments. Some won't even allow a link at all. But this is another area of the plan.

[S10]

SpinnerChief is free. Don't forget as long as it gets accepted by the article directories then you shouldn't care too much about it being 'perfect'. All you want/need is that link. Aim for 50-60% uniqueness for each article.

GoArticles, Articlesbase and EzineArticles (although it can take weeks to get approved nowadays) are the best places. Don't forget to vary where you send articles, what types of backlinks ie, social bookmarking, web 2.0 properties, video sites (not only YouTube), press releases (see Molly for press release distribution), blog commenting (the 'name' section is your anchor text), forum profiles, forum signatures.

As for nofollow links, it's a good idea to have those too. Remember, some links are better than no links at all and having 100% dofollow isn't really natural. Don't be frightened of the sandbox either, I create thousands of links for my sites (or tiered) and only see improvements even on new ones. I can only guess that people that get deindexed do something very bad or get bad links. Even if you do get slapped, just keep on building links. It's all about link velocity. If you start at 1,000 links a day then keep it going. It's the stopping and inconsistency of links that raises alarm bells.

[Ghostgen]

So it is more about seeing a natural consistent pattern of links being built rather than just a load at once and then nothing?

[S10]

Short answer: yes.

Of course, there are variations on that. For example, when the iPhone 4 came out I bet there were zillions of links being thrown around the world then not much a few months later. SEO is a constant job (battle?). If you don't work at it, don't expect any returns or at least any long term ones.

An example:

Monday 10 articles submitted to 10 different directories
Tuesday 10 social bookmarking accounts made and posted on
Wednesday 10 web 2.0 properties
Thursday 10 blog comments
Friday 10 press releases
Saturday RSS and ping all links
Sunday Backlink your backlinks

and repeat. That's fairly basic but gives you an idea. After week 3-4 you should see some movement. After week 5-6 look at outsourcing this as you have first hand proof of its effectiveness. If it doesn't work, try something different.

[Ghostgen]

That's really useful stuff! That example that you use, should that be per article or feature that I do, or just to the site in general? My site will be a lot of short individual product reviews and then a couple of weekly feature group articles or versus style comparison articles. To follow that pattern for short product reviews which could be 20+ per week and trying to get all of those links doing this on a part time/spare time venture would not work. However it would be feasible to do for a two or three feature articles.

[S10]

It should be per article that you do or any new page and rinse and repeat.

I completely understand about not having the time to do it but in this game you really get out what you put in. Do the hard work yourself so you can see some returns then outsource each step. Fiverr is good as it's only £3-odd per job.

[Ghostgen]

I had a look at fiverr...some interesting stuff on there??? But also some useful possibilities.

All this has however helped in putting together a bit of a strategy for promoting my site.

[winsoar]

What I do is write a 400 word article myself then add spin tags. If you don't know what they are look up Jetspinner tags.

I then use a cheap piece of article spinning software to create unique articles and upload them manually to around 30 different article directories that I normally use.

I've tried using outsourcing for articles but it was either low quality or too expensive so now I just write them myself.

[Ghostgen]

Loads of great advice.

It is all much appreciated

[javinder_mn]

I know this is an old thread but I believe article marketing still has its place in the affiliate arena and thought I should share the following;

Article Directory List - Directory Critic

it offers a critique of over 3000 article directories to help you generate better quality links (in theory anyway).

hope it helps

[jezza101]

To be honest I don't rate article submission that highly, I've given it a good go but never found great results. My manual attempts saw no attributable boost to rankings and no real referrals to speak of.

A recent experiment with an automated service did give my test site a step wise boost to traffic for £20 so it's not something I would ignore. However I am very weary about investing a load of time into it. Especially when you could be investing that time into developing a site.

I'd still like to hope a good site can attract natural links and these are the ones you really want.

[S10]

To be honest I don't rate article submission that highly, I've given it a good go but never found great results. My manual attempts saw no attributable boost to rankings and no real referrals to speak of.

A recent experiment with an automated service did give my test site a step wise boost to traffic for £20 so it's not something I would ignore. However I am very weary about investing a load of time into it. Especially when you could be investing that time into developing a site.

I'd still like to hope a good site can attract natural links and these are the ones you really want.

See my above posts regarding link velocity. If you're not building links your site isn't going to move. Perfect on-page SEO can give some gains but without getting backlinks (votes) pointing at your site equals no climbing the SERPs, no traffic and no sales.

Just spoke to a new client today and he said he was surprised he's never had any (holiday) bookings through his site, which is admittedly very well made and very pretty, but he'd never heard of SEO.

Article marketing is just part of the process. It's the strategy that you put into place around it and backing up links with more backlinks, RSS feeds, getting the links crawled and indexed that makes the difference. A backlink that isn't indexed is a worthless one. If you've spent £20 on buying links then spend a week getting them found and indexed, so they are actually worth £20.

Just my 2p