Episode 013 – Building Backlinks – Article Submissions

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Article submission is a great way to bring traffic to your site and build backlinks. There are five key advantages to using articles to build backlinks.

• You are allowed 2-3 backlinks for every article you submit.
• You have complete control over the anchor text for each link
• Every backlink is a oneway link, many times from PR 6 sites
• Depending on how good the article is it can be picked-up posted in other places, thus, building more backlinks.
• Article traffic is a means to get traffic on highly competitive keyterms.

These facts make articles a very attractive way to get traffic and links. The only downside is that people can take your content and remove the links. The good news is that Google doesn’t count stolen or duplicated content as valuable. This should be enough incentive to deter would be thieves but there still is a good chance it will be plagiarized or stolen.

As a general rule it would be best not to host the articles you’re submitting on your site. The exception to this is if you post the article on your site, wait for it to get indexed, then start posting in article directories. I’ve done both and would suggest not hosting your articles on your site. Instead send them to your author page on one of these article directories.

When writing your article try to give some good information and submit your best work. Keep things simple and easy to read. Avoid run-on sentences. Don’t go crazy on the length. Shorter articles can be just as good or better than really long articles. A standard requirement is a minimum of 500 to 700 words. Avoid making your article a sales letter. You’ll seriously hurt the chances of having your article picked up and distributed by other people.

At the end of the article its common to have an “about the author” section. If I’m trying to get more keyword phrases in, sometimes I’ll use “Additional Resources” as the text before my links. That way I don’t have to work my keyword phrases into an awkward author profile.

If you have a really great article maybe you don’t want to submit it everywhere. If this is the case you might consider the alternative of posting it on your site and have social media sites look at it there. We’ll talk more on that in the next episode.

This is a list of article submission sites I’ve combed through and submitted to personally. Most of them are general-purpose directories. If you have a specific niche or type of business you may want to seek out topic specific article directories. If you want the Excel sheet subscribe to Premium Content and send it after the episode is published.