There are now hundreds of article directories that cater to both the general and niche markets. Because of the desire of authors to get their articles published on as many places as possible and the sheer number of article directories on the web, some authors have turned to automated submission software and third-party submission services to hasten the submission process.

The use of third-party submission agents presents an ethical problem. While some article directories don’t care how articles are submitted to them, as long as the articles meet their editorial guidelines, many rely on authors as a major source of traffic to their sites. They want you, the author, to browse their sites, read their submission guidelines, and become a regular visitor to their sites in return for distributing your article.

Any article directory that cares about the quality of articles they publish will spend some time to review each submitted article before publishing it. As an article publisher myself, I can attest to the work involved in reviewing, reformatting, and correcting minor errors of every article submitted to me. Since I get hundreds of submissions every day, I am forced to reject any articles that appear as if they’ve been submitted by a third party or through an automated submission process.

It’s not exactly rocket science to distinguish between an article submitted by hand and one submitted through an automated process. The software-submitted article may be improperly formatted, suggesting that the submitter never bothered to read the submission guidelines before submitting their article. It may be missing a required field, or it may be submitted to the wrong category. Different article sites stipulate different guidelines and requirements for what they accept. It’s not possible for an automated submitter to take into account all of these differences to allow you to submit to several hundred directories with a few clicks of the mouse button.

Many article publishers do not even allow manual submissions by third-party submission services. A common telltale sign that an article has been submitted through a third-party service is when a single author account is used to submit multiple articles with different resource boxes. Submissions from multiple author accounts from a single IP address are another indication of third-party submission.

Any software program that promises to “do 99% of the work for you” does nothing more than spamming your article all over the web. Some of these spam machines even post a link along with your article back to the submission software. This is a sure-fire way to get your article rejected and even get you banned from some directories.

Ideally, authors should submit their articles by hand. Meanwhile, there is an understandable need for a way to quickly submit to a great number of sites. An acceptable compromise between laborious manual submission and a completely automated process is a semi-manual tool that allows you to browse article sites as well as quickly submit articles to them. Article Submitter is an inexpensive semi-manual submitter that stores your article, personal information, and resource box as you visit each article site. When you’re ready to submit your article, the software auto-fills the submission forms for you, eliminating the need for tedious copying and pasting. The whole process is very much like manual submission, only a lot faster.

When it comes building a website that stands out above the crowd, content is king, or so goes the old mantra. By this we mean content that is fresh, unique and original.

But what exactly is unique and original?

With billions of pages on the web, one would be hard-pressed to come up with material is truly unique and original. Chances are, anything that could be said already has been said somewhere by someone else. The only thing left to originality is the way in which the words are strung together.

People surf the web to be informed and entertained, and with over 100 million sites on the web, there is no shortage of information. Much of the information on the web is redundant and unoriginal. But you can be original in the way you present it.

People surf the web for different reasons. They surf to be informed, to be entertained, to sell and buy stuff, to be aroused, and so on and so forth. In the end it’s about putting a smile on people’s face. So, even if you don’t have anything original to say (like in this post), try to say it in a fresh, new way to capture your readers’ interest. But don’t try too hard. You either have it or you don’t.

I’m using this post to keep a running list of the top ten methods which I feel are the best strategies for building links to a website. This list is based on my own experience of building links to my sites throughout the years. It’s important to keep in mind that when it comes to SEO, nothing is set in stone. SEO is a cat-and-mouse game, so I will revise this list from time to time as the field continues to evolve.

Please note that the order in which these methods are listed do not necessarily reflect their order of effectiveness. Some methods may work better than others for certain sites.

1. Submit to web directories

Submitting to web directories is a vital part of every successful link building campaign. Apart from driving traffic to your website through direct referrals, web directories provide static, one-way links to your site, boosting your link popularity and improving your rankings on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

It’s important to note that not all directory listings are equal. Listings from trusted, established directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ are more valuable than those from the thousands of others on the net. All else being equal, a link from a directory focused on your site’s niche is worth more than one from a general directories.

Submit to both free and paid directories. Free directories provide one-way links to your site with no strings attached, but they can take forever to review your link. Paid listings can be a good investment if the fees are reasonable and the pages on which your link will reside have decent PRs. Your sites will be listed with fewer competing links on paid directories.

2. Write articles and press releases

Submitting your article to directories is a highly effective way to build one-way links to your site. First, you write a thoughtful and informative article on an topic in your area of expertise. Then you submit it to article directories to be read by the general public and reprinted on other web sites. Appended to the end of your article is a “resource box” which contain links to your site and email address.

While there are hundreds or even thousands of article directories on the web, you should focus on writing a high quality article and submitting to a handful of the more popular ones. Having your article published on a top directory can be worth more than a hundred less reputable ones. If you write something that people find useful, they may pick it up and reprint it on their blogs, newsletters, etc. This is how a quality article propagates virally in cyberspace– it virtually distributes itself without your having to manually submit to a thousand article directories.

3. Exchange links with related sites

Online forums like Digitalpoint are an excellent place to find reciprocal linking partners. Avoid sending out spammy e-mail solicitations like those generated by many SEO software programs. I get dozens of these everyday.

4. Make use of social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites help bring together internet users from every corner of the world into a virtual global village. Submitting content to sites like Digg.com, YouTube.com and Del.icio.us can bring lots of visitors in a hurry.

It’s important to understand that sites like Digg and YouTube are not necessarily shock sites. Although there is some publicity to be gained from the shock value of an article or video, one must not resort to tasteless and offensive materials to gain attention. There is only so much value in the attention gotten by being the village idiot.

5. Buy text links on other sites

Although link buying is somewhat an unnatural way to build links, it may be the only way to increase your link popularity if your site is not unique or interesting enough to get people to link to you on their own. Most commercial sites fall into this category.

You should buy links in a way that simulates natural linking as much as possible. Buy text links from sites that are related to yours. Vary anchor texts and descriptions. Buy links from internal as well as home pages. Buy links from both high- and low-PR sites (which can be gotten at a bargain prices).

6. Participate in online forums

Sharing knowledge can be a very powerful way to establish your online presence and credibility. If you check your backlinks on search engines like Google and Yahoo!, you may notice that a number of them come from the signatures of forum posts– that is, if you post in forums. Most forums allow signature links. I don’t participate in forums that don’t as allowing them is the least the forums can do to compensate me for contributing to their contents.

7. Ask webmasters of related sites to links to yours

This often overlooked strategy can be a great source of “natural” one-way inbound links. I have gotten many of my links this way. The days are long gone when all you had to do to get people to link to you was to have a decent website out there. Nowadays you have to be more proactive by approaching other webmasters and asking them to link to you.

Do a search on Google on the keywords that you want to target. Visit the sites on the first few pages of the search results to see if they link to other sites (look for “links” or “resources” pages). Then write to the ones that you think might be interested in linking to your site. If your site is seen as a complement rather than a direct competitor to the site you want to be linked from, you stand a higher chance of getting a positive response.

8. Ask vendors and clients to link to your site

I once bought a $350 script package and asked my vendor if they could feature my site as site made with their script. They obliged and gave me a PR7 text link from their site. Since the link is worth at least $40 a month, my initial investement for the script has paid for itself many times over. Besides the SEO benefits, it is responsible for thousands of visitors to my site a month through direct clicks. The moral of the story: don’t be afraid to ask. The worse that could happen is that they say “no”.

9. Blogging

Setting up a blog is a no-brainer. Even if you’ve no web designing experience whatsoever, you have a blog up and running in no time. Blogs allows for a more informal setting to get your words across. So, it’s much easier to write a blog entry than an article to submit to article directories. Use your blog to share knowledge, voice opinions, connect with others with similar interests, and of course, to link to your other sites.

Avoid spamming blog networks like Blogger and MySpace. These spam blogs (”splogs”) are a waste of time as they will not get much attention from people and will yield little, if any, SEO benefits. Write about something you know and have a genuine interest in. Focus on quality rather than quantity.

10. Content is king

Yes, content is still king. In fact, content is by far the most important of the ten strategies I’ve mentioned. Having fresh, unique, engaging content is an excellent way to attract natural linking from other sites. This is the type of links that search engines like.

You may have heard of the buzz phrase, link-baiting, that is being tossed around in the SEO community nowadays. The idea is to get others to link to you voluntarily, perhaps by causing some type of sensation or controversy on YouTube, Digg, the message boards, or whatever. Link-baiting, in my opinion, is no more than a new play on the old “content is king” mantra.

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Honorable Mentions:

(These are the strategies that didn’t quite make the Top Ten list but are nevertheless deserving of consideration. Some of them may at one point have been in the top ten but had since been removed to make room for a new one.)

Write testimonials and reviews

Writing a glowing review about a product or service and submitting to your vendor or service provider can give you a very high quality link back to your site. But this strategy can prove time-consuming as many vendors publish only a handful of testimonials from their customers. Don’t waste your time by sending a testimonial to a vendor who does not have a “Testimonials” page on their site. When submitting a review or testimonial, don’t forget to mention to your vendor that they should be feel free to publish your comments on their site (along with a link to your site).

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Top Ten List Change Log:

v.1.0.1 (07/05/11) Minor edit

v.1.0.5 (07/05/16) Moderate edit

v.1.1.0 (07/06/06) Strategy #7, “Write testimonials and reviews” replaced with “Ask webmasters of related sites to links to yours”. “Testimonials” moved to “Honorable Mentions”.

By Mark Daoust

How do you hide a tree? Put it in a forest.

This is what many authors have effectively done when they suggest that you should use articles to promote your website. The technique that these authors suggest can be summarized as follows: write something you know about, add your resource box, submit your article to tens of thousands of frëe reprint directories and distribution groups, and wait for publishers to pick up your article.

But this is entirely the wrong method.

If you were to follow the advice of these authors you may see some traffïc, receive a few inbound links, and gain some publicity for your website, but how does this make writing articles different from any other basic promotion technique? Rather than writing an article to bring in this traffïc, why not just participate in forums, submit to niche directories, or pay for quality traffïc? Articles can do so much more.

Why The Current Thought is Bad

Ask yourself this question: what are publishers looking for? If you said content, you are wrong. Publishers (or at least publications worth reading) are not looking for just content – they are looking for original content. They do not want an article that is going to show up on 500 other websites, including frëe reprint directories. They want an article that people will link to, that only they offer. It is their unique content that will allow them to separate themselves from their competition.

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