Simple Tips To Get The Most Out Of Manual Article Submissions

article directory submision tipsHere are a few tips you want to keep in mind when submitting to article directories, not only to help your articles have a higher PR but also to help them get indexed!

Importance of tags/categories

A lot of you might not put a lot of thought into your category or tag choice but it is actually really helpful to select appropriate ones when submitting to article directories like ezine articles that have high PR related to tags or categories

Let me give you some examples:

on ezine articles “Health and Fitness” has a PR of 5: http://ezinearticles.com/?cat=Health-and-Fitness

If you go down in the category of anxiety you have a Pr of 4 http://ezinearticles.com/?cat=Health-and-Fitness:Anxiety

While sadly I cannot see if ezine articles since their post Panda changes in February still put importance on tags, they used to be quite important before their massive site layout change. For example an article about a book review on skincare could contain many tags that are common and might have PR such as “health” “acne” “skincare” “nutrition” “book review” and if you tag your article with all relevant tags with PR your article would appear on all of these (until you are pushed off due to newer articles filling up the page). Much better then putting random tags that noone uses! Ideally I would try to find some high PR tags or categories that also are not used to death by other writers. Obviously tags like “health” are very popular (and most other tags that look like category names) but maybe if you are reviewing a health book you could instead put it in the less used book review category! Anyway, I am not sure if ezine articles still has pages indexed with tags BUT the tags that usually has Pr in one directory usually also has some in other directories so I definitely was re-using these all the time, they definitely also work for wordpress blogs when some article submission services/tools allow you to include them.

The gist of what I am trying to say is this, do not ignore your selection of tags! They can give you an initial boost of PR in your article that translates into your website. Many of my websites which had links from articles containing high PR tags not only often got a Pr of 3-4 on ezine articles, but that went to my website too which indicates that it was probably a strong link. Of course over time it might lose it’s PR because it will get pushed off the first page of the tag but it is a nice boost and it will help get your article indexed if nothing else.

How I do resource boxes

I do not think I ever got into detail for this but basically I write them completely about the subject and I barely even mention myself. The simple format is basically. If you want to find more info on x, make sure to check out my blog about this topic and even y. Or another simple one is Hopefully you enjoyed this article, for more information about x and y head to my blog! Don’t copy paste this… I do not use that EXACT one because usually I add a bit more info about the subject. But barebones, it’s basically that. I remember reading in the forum that some diretories (such as ezine) are much more strict now on what they accept but I can’t say I ever got an article refused using this format.

Linkwheels for article directories

article site linkwheelI sometimes do linkwheels within my article submissions. This is for a few reasons. The main one is articles posted to ezinearticles are always indexed very quickly so I often have one of the two links going to another article or backlink source that often does not get indexed without help. Often, these are a go article submission or something like a Squidoo/Hubpage (Infobarrel seems to get indexed quickly). Another reason I like to do this is simply because I tend to think the backlinks will be more powerful. I also have a theory that additional links to the same website on a webpage (even if a different URL) are discounted but this is hard to prove so I may or may not be right. I just feel it would make sense for google to have the most weight given to the first anchor text + url given to a specific domain (or inner page in that domain). However I tested it extensively at some point and the second link in a  page does help (I just think it might have diminishing returns for each additional link to a different url that is part of the same domain…).

As you can see from the picture, I do not have the full linkwheel linking to my main website because those are detected and discounted by google. So if I really go down the path of a bigger linkwheel I make sure to have some not link back to  he main website. the second link can be used for another random backlink somewhere. These can be time consuming to do but the main thing to keep in mind is to not have some huge chain of links always linking to the same website.

 

Since I might start with creating a squidoo lens (because it can easily be edited later) I would probably then submit an ezine article, and basically build the above linkwheel in a non clockwork fashion.

Due to approval times, it can be a bit annoying to submit another article another day so I sometimes use redirect plugins. Good ones for this are affiliate cloaking plugins such as the free pretty link. I used it a lot until I was able to get a pre release discount on Ghost URL which is what we use on this blog, it’s a bit more advanced but for doing the redirect trick I want to talk about, it’s completely unnecessary. Anyway, the trick is to make one of your articles link to www.randomdomain.com/ezinearticlelink. BTW, www.randomdomain.com/ezinearticlelink does not exist as a page/post but once your articles are approved you could make www.randomdomain.com/ezinearticlelink redirect (make sure it’s a permanent one which is 301 and not 307, so it keeps the SEO value) to the actual ezine article. You can get creative with this redirect trick and use it for way more other things but this is something I did for a while and while I just wait for the articles to be approved now, I felt like sharing this trick for those who feel it would help or for the creative people that this might spark some ideas!

Images

I just wanted to mention that for most article submissions that you can attach an image to, I almost always do it. Who knows if it has any SEO value, I just do it for the readers of the article so it looks nicer and hopefully “sticks” and does not get labelled as spam or whatever. I usually put my keyword in the “alt” tag of the image too if I can (always do it on your main money sites, easy way to tell google what your image and maybe page is about!).

Next article will probably be a service review, if you guys have any topics you would like me to cover let me know in the comments and I might do it :).

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