How Article Directories Benefit You Two Ways – SEO & Traffic

Most of you know what an article directory is but I would bet that maybe only half of you know the total benefit of sending articles over to them.  If you’re already a brilliant mind than you know this, but for the other half keep on reading and learn something new today as we talk article directories.

An article directory is simply a place where you can submit articles and they will get published on their site.  Most people do this for the SEO value of getting a backlink up there.  You can do this manually, you can use an automated program like SENUKE, or you can hire someone to do this.  Where a lot of people make a mistake is in submitting articles that are crap.  Either written poorly by a cheap outsourced worker, or spun in an autospinner software, or picked off one directory and submitted to another.  The people who are doing this are doing it for one reason, because they want to include their backlink into the article and get their backlink on the article directory site.  Ok, fine, keep doing that if you really want to miss out on all the traffic you could be getting…  Oh, that perked your ears up a bit, huh.

The second benefit of article directory sites that many people ignore is that good articles are taken off the article directory sites and used on people’s websites, in syndication, or otherwise.  If you write a high quality article that is well written, is an authority article, and talks about a relevant topic to today’s world than you are significantly increasing the chances that people are going to take that article and republish it on their site (after all, that is the true point of an article directory… for web owners to get free content).  When someone publishes your article on their site they are supposed to publish it as is and give credit to you.  So, in your resource box on the article directory site you should always write what your website is.  In the article, I always like to drop one link back to my website via anchor text.  And now when people start republishing my article I am getting natural backlinks on a variety of sites that I would never get a backlink on through hiring someone to do SEO work for me.

Think about this for a moment.  You are getting actual websites republishing your article with a link back to your site.  You are getting great SEO value.  You will get traffic to your site.  You will gain some new daily readers of your site.  And all you had to do is publish a quality article instead of a crappy respun one.

Don’t believe me about this?  Give it a try and assuming you are using some kind of traffic analytics software on your site you can see where the traffic to your site is coming from, and after a while you’ll notice some strange traffic coming from places you don’t understand why.  And then you’ll check it out and you’ll see what I wrote about above has actually happened.  The lazy people can make a few bucks, but the people who are willing to put in a little more effort are the ones who are going to build a sustainable business that will generate much more income for a much longer time.  Don’t be part of the lazy crowd, stand out and fill up your bank account by going that extra mile.  I’m off to the beach now because even I need some R&R time every now and then.