Many whitepapers, articles, and blog posts has been written over the last few months regarding content marketing and its impact on your digital marketing, but not many on where to submit your articles. The Google Panda update by Google is penalizing websites and article directories with poor quality content. This was a huge downfall for many website owners as they were losing traffic to their valuable sites, and losing precious rankings on the search engines that resulted into sales.
To maintain relevant high search traffic from the search engines, article directories needed to enforce strict quality guidelines so that members only submit relevant, unspun, quality content to them. These guidelines are meant for the quality of the directory, and for everyone to benefit submitting articles to them.
If you are submitting articles to any article directories, how can you ensure that it doesn’t count negatively against you and adding value to your website? Find below a couple of tips on submitting your content to article directories.
Content marketing tips
- Original content: Every article that you submit needs to be original and not a copied or spun variation of the original article. Most of the top article directories are manually reviewing the quality of the articles and checking if they are original. Many directories allow short duplication of sentences (when quoting content), but not large segments.
- Spell check and grammar: Do not submit any articles with poor grammar. If you are using copywriters to write your content, make sure that they have a good grasp of the English language. Low quality articles using poor grammar can be rejected.
- Use proper word format: Many articles submitted are copied directly from your word processor and it usually embeds lots of extra code with the document. To get around this, copy your content into Wordpad or Notepad and then copy the contents of that file to the article directory.
- Length of article: Google wants content to index and if you don’t have enough content, it can index your article to its full potential. For your articles, use a minimum of 400 words. Most short articles can be rejected.
- Links: Don’t overlink your article. This is poor SEO and will not provide any good benefits. In my experience, use only one link in your content or footer message. This allows good link flow within the directory.
- Proper format: Articles needs to be written for easy reading using sub headings, lists, etc. This helps “human” visitors that are interested to read it easily. Don’t write only for the search engines.
In most cases, the articles you are using in your digital marketing campaign should always be relevant, readable, and top quality. A link from a top article directory is worth gold in the long run.
Yes – I do agree Anton, especially with the tip on links.
Most
people don’t understand
how the sharing-link-juice schematic / structure work
in a website. Having to many links will only devalue the other links on the
page. And this is a Big No-No when it comes to good (white – not black) SEO;
Onpage and Offpage alike. Not to mention the confusion you will create amongst
the user with too many links to click on (theoretically even if they all point
to the same page).
Indeed Byron. Link value works like a waterfall flowing through your website, and externally.