Promote Your Blog or Website through Article Directories – More is Not Better

Running a successful website or blog requires some creative thinking, but it is also a good idea to follow some traditional blogging practices as well.  One of the best ways to increase the SEO value of your blog or website is to submit your blog to high quality article directories.

This will help you establish yourself as an expert in your niche, increase your pagerank, keyword relevance and probably some quality click-through traffic in the process.

The problem is that article directories are very similar to blogs in the value they can bring to your blog or website.  For every quality article directory that will help you establish your online presence, there are probably twenty that were creatively designed to waste the time of rising web authors.  A common mistake that novice bloggers make is submitting their articles to every web directory they find, rather than spending a fraction of the time researching which article directories work best.

Personally, I made the mistake of downloading an application called Article Submitter, which could have more appropriately been titled Blogger Time

Waster 4.0. I am just glad I chose to get the free version.  The developers of the program brag about how they created a piece of software that allows users to submit their articles instantly to a hundred article directories across the Internet.  First of all, this is a little misleading to begin with.  When you use the software, you do not get to click a few buttons and have your articles instantly submitted nearly as effortlessly as they claim.  Granted, it does save some time, but it still requires some effort on the part of the user.  While you do not have to go each website individually and the articles are preloaded into the submission forms, you still have to invest a lot of time manually submitting each article.

This wouldn’t be so bad, if it wasn’t for the fact that most of the article directories provided no value.  In fact, many of them no longer even existed.  I was pretty annoyed by the number of directories I tried to access through the software only to find a homepage telling me that the domain had expired or the site had been taken down.  Of the 50% that still existed, I only heard back from a few of them about whether or not my article was accepted.  In fact, three months later almost all of my articles are still living in a state of purgatory waiting to be reviewed.

The next problem was that of these hundred or so directories, even if my articles ever got posted they would probably yield no value.  Only one of the top 20 article directories appeared on this list, while the rest were mostly no name directories no one ever heard of. The homepage of the article directory itself was likely only a pagerank of 1 or 2.  Of course, any article listed would not have such a luxury.  Finally, it is unlikely that anyone would ever find your article if it was posted on a directory that none of them had ever heard of.  Worse, since search engines hate duplicate content it is possible that an article approved on a useless directory may prevent an article from a high quality site from being indexed.

This is why it is so crucial that you not only write great articles for backlinks to your website, but you also must submit them to the right places.  Ezine Articles should always be your first choice.  They are regularly reviewed, provide high pagerank and yield a high amount of traffic.  In fact, every one of my articles has had a pagerank of 6 and had a higher ranking in the search engines than any of the other directories.  Article Dashboard, GoArticles and Article Alley are also valuable.  I used to use Articles Base, but the links they provided are nofollow and therefore do not pass pagerank back to your website.

It is a good idea to submit to a few article directories.  What you must keep in mind is that you need to focus on the right articles.  If you focus on submitting your articles to the top 10 directories, you are going to create many high quality backlinks that will be extremely valuable to improving the success of your website or blog.

Kalen Smith is the founder of Engineer-a-Business, a website that provides niche resources for entrepreneurs attempting to start technology-related businesses and gives consultants from many disciplines the opportunity to network and sell their services to promising entrepreneurs. If you would like to learn more, follow him on Twitter at Engineerbiz or visit his website (http://www.engineer-a-business.com). Kalen’s current project is putting together statistics of top entrepreneurs and technology trenders on Twitter, which anyone can apply to at his website.