Here’s another testimony that submitting your articles to Article Directories will help improve your inbound links. Inbound links, otherwise known as backlinks, are links pointing to your blog from other websites. Inbound link is an important element in successful search engine optimization. A high number of inbound link helps improve your Google page rank and search engine ranking. This results to higher visibility, which ultimately translates to a higher traffic.

Today’s post will discuss two effective approaches that you can use to earn more inbound links to your blog. Before getting into the details let’s first have an overview of how Article Directories work.

An Overview Of Article Directories

Article Directories are generally websites that offer free contents. It allows different authors to submit their articles giving them link incentives, which means if I submit my article to an Article Directory, I can link to my blog from my article. Once my article is approved, the article directory then offers my article as a free web content to their users.

There 3 main advantages of gaining inbound links by submitting your articles to Article Directories.

• Link Optimization Feature – Anchor text is an important aspect in search engine optimization. Ranking high on certain keywords like ”Blogging Tips” on search engine results is easier when the anchor text used to link to your blog is “Blogging Tips”. Unfortunately, we do not have control over what anchor text is used by other bloggers when they link to us. However, most article directories give you the opportunity to use keywords or key phrases that you wish to rank high on search engines. Most article directories allow you to link to up to 3 websites and give you the freedom to decide where you place the links (beginning, middle or end of article).
• Wide Selection of Article Directories – There are a lot of article directories online, which is another good reason to use them as a method to increase inbound links to your blog. Here’s a list of links to different article directories where you can submit your articles. You can also find another list of article directories sorted according to topic and Google page rank here.
• Effective, Easy and Fast Way to Increase Inbound Links – Because there are numerous article directories available online, you can easily increase inbound links to your blog by submitting your posts to all of them. An easy and effective way to increase your blog’s inbound link is to submit one article to different article directories. However, you need to do some changes to your article to avoid being penalized for duplicate content.

Two Strategic Approaches To Article Directory Submission

Now that you know how article directories work and what are the advantages of using it to increase your inbound links, let’s move to understand the two strategic approaches we can use in article submission.

1. Submit Articles To Different Article Directories (Mass Submission)

The first approach is article mass submission to various article directories. This means, you create articles and submit it to as much article directories as you can. This also means, you need to devout your time and effort to submit your articles. Although there are easy alternatives like using softwares and programs to automatically submit your article or pay for companies to do the submission in your behalf, it is still recommended that you do the submission yourself.

The obvious disavantages of mass submission are:

• You need to spend more time submitting your article.
• Higher risk of getting penalized for duplicate content.
• Higher risk of getting your article rejected because most article directories verify that your article is not a duplicate content. In case of mass submission, bloggers usually don’t re-edit their article before submitting to another article directory.
• Increase your operational cost (if you choose to pay for companies to submit your articles)
• Mass submission may also result to a poorly written article. Usually, it happens when you edit and re-edit your article to submit it to another article directory or when you are using softwares to scramble your articles to avoid being penalized for duplicate content.
• Because of the poor quality of article submitted, the chance of being reposted in other websites becomes slim. Getting “Re-posted” means, the article you submitted to article directories are published in other blogs, which further increases inbound links to your blog.
• Google considers some Article directories as SPAM so submitting your article to all article directories may harm your search engine optimization instead of boosting it. Be careful to where you submit your articles! 

2. Submit Quality Articles To Selected Article Directories (Selective Submission)

The better and more strategic approach to article submission is selective submission. In this approach, you select a few article directories, preferrably those with high Google Page Rank and high trafficked article directories, from where you will submit your articles. This is obviously less time consuming and a more effective approach.

Here are some reasons why selective submission is preferrable over mass submission.

• Submitting to a selected number of article directories saves you more time. You can use this time to work on your article and do the necessary editing before re-submitting it to another article.
• Selective submission minimizes the risk of duplicate content as you are given more time to edit your articles.
• A quality post, which is more likely possible when you opt for selective submission, has a higher chance of being re-posted in other blogs.

Check this example of an article I submitted to one of the article directories that got picked up by some bloggers, which they re-posted resulting to over 100 inbound links to my blog. The post is titled “Blogging Tips When Writing Content For Your Blog“. You can check the build up of inbound links to these three posts:

1. Cost Free Blogging Services
2. Create Your Free Blog With Blogger
3. Blogger : Blogger’s Choice For Blogging

Over the next coming days, I expect more inbound links to build up as more bloggers publish my article on their blogs.

Conclusion

Submitting your articles to article directories presents an effective and easy method of building inbound links to your blog. This is not as easy undertaking but is certainly a rewarding approach to search engine optimization. Given the two strategic appoaches to article submission, you have the final decision as to which one you’re going to use.

Thank you for your time and good luck to your link building strategies!

Have you tried using article submission as a way to increase your inbound links? How was your experience? How many links have you accumulated? Do share your experience through the comment. Thanks.

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