Why Article Directories Are A Good Thing

If you have any interest in gaining exposure for your website or online business, than I’m sure you’ve heard of article directories. If not, then you are in for a great little lesson on these valuable resources that are often a free way of doing some great internet marketing for your business. Whether you have a traditional brick and mortar store, an online business or both, you need to get visitors or traffic to your place in order to make a profit. In business, the way we define success or failure is with profit and loss statements. If your business is ‘in the black’ it is having some level of success. If you are losing money, then you are either in the wrong business, don’t market it effectively or a combination of these and other factors are at work.  If you want to learn how to make money using keywords online, then follow along with this hub.

Rather than try to dissect why your business isn’t working, instead you can try to solve the problem with smart marketing strategies.  That is what this site here is all about.  While it is admittedly brief in nature, the content can steer you in a direction to create a very good online income.  The main reason that many website owners and even people who might consider themselves internet marketers or entrepreneurs don’t make it is because they don’t know how to get traffic to their sites.  In the cyberworld, this is referred to as organic traffic, or traffic that comes to your site by way of the search engines.

You see, when someone types a word or phrase into Google or Yahoo, the biggest search engines, they are expecting an answer.  This answer may come in the form of a product or service they are looking for, or simply an answer to their question.  These search engines do their very best to connect these searchers with the answer that is most relevant to their question.  The search engines use a variety of proprietary tools to come up with special algorithms that they use to figure out how to rank websites according to their content, links and the other factors in their proprietary mix.  

What is immediately clear to all new website owners is that for a while, they may see little to no return in terms of visitors or money from their web presence. There are many factors at work, but one of the main ones is poor search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and practices. This simply refers to the way that the site is found and read by the search engine machines. These machines or ‘bots’ search or ‘crawl’ sites all the time in order to figure out what is on them and deliver the appropriate content to the end user typing terms into the search box in the engine’s browser.

If your site is very relevant and has been around for a while, with links pointing to it from other similarly trusted sites, then it is very possible that your site will come up on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs) when someone queries a term related to your site’s content. If you’ve done good SEO work on your site and you are familiar with the importance of quality backlinks to your site, then you likely going to continue to climb in the rankings.

However, this is where many site owners fail. If you do not get quality links back to your site, you will not perform as well as you could. Some factors will still allow you to be found up the pages somewhat, but nothing like you could with good backlinks. This is what this site is here to inform you about. A great source of quality links back to your site is through using article directory sites like EzineArticles, GoArticles and ArticlesBase. These are very trusted authority sites in the search engines’ ‘minds’, so getting links from these sites to your own will help your site climb up in rank.

What these sites do is allow you to write content that matches what someone might find on your site and then you can point them there with a link within that article. So, it is like an excerpt, in a way, that points people back to your site for more information. Since you are writing the articles, they have all the content that you would want expressed and the proper link terms that you would want used pointing to your site. Now, you can’t just point thousands of these articles from the same place to your site because each successive one loses some strength in the eyes of the search engines. This is to prevent some spam sites from just overloading the internet with garbage and ranking high for terms like ‘income tax’ that somehow beat out the government sites.

Since there are many of these types of sites, you don’t need to feel limited. In fact, there are sites that are large like the ones mentioned and others that are quite a bit smaller in scale. Sites like InfoBarrel and Hubpages fall into the high medium to large size scale as well, while sites like ArticlElements and MyVerbosity are quite a bit smaller in size and scope. The sites we’ve mentioned up to this point are mostly general category sites, meaning that there are articles from many website owners and professionals that are providing unique material. You can also find narrower categories of these article submission sites that can help users find your site that are more specialized, if you will. A site like Current Health Articles is one that comes to mind. This site focuses on professionals in the health care field that helps them direct visitors and potential clients to their sites online. The more of these types of links that their site can acquire, the more relative strength their site can achieve.

So, if you have a site that you would like to have register somewhere in the first three positions of the search engine results, then you are probably going to have to do some article marketing. Whether or not you write all the content yourself or not is your choice. In fact, you could opt to outsource your content and just pay someone else to write all of it. If you are really aggressively marketing, you could do this plus write a lot of content yourself as well. In this way, you will get more bang for the buck out of the time you have and with the article directories at your disposal.