Many people cannot afford the costs involved in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and have to rely on website and product promotion techniques such as search engine marketing, web directory exposure and web article marketing, of which article distribution to directories is a significant part. Let's have a look at what is involved in marketing and submitting articles, and what benefits they can provide you with.



Writing Articles

Writing articles, either for website content or for article distribution, is a skill, and much more than simply writing a few paragraphs on the topic of your website. The construction of the summary, title, opening paragraph, body text, resource and even the keyword list makes a significant difference to your success or lack of it. Article research is also important.

You have to learn what is needed in each of these components of an article intended for distribution, although the summary and resource are not needed if the article is to be used as content on your own website. The use of keywords in each of these components is critical, as is the semantic relevance of the other vocabulary used to the subject of the article in general and to the keyword and title in particular.

These are learned skills that inexperienced writers will be unlikely to have without instruction from established writers experienced in web article marketing and article distribution. Similar understanding is needed of what is required with respect to distribution to article directories.

Article Distribution

The purpose of submitting articles for publication in a range of article directories, ezines and other online publications is basically threefold:

a) To get backlinks to your website and so improve your Google page rank. The benefit of the actual PageRank index is debatable, but links do improve your chances of a high listing in the search engines.

The four main search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN an Ask, and all take backlinks to your web pages into consideration when calculating the authority of your site, and the listing position of each page in their indices

b) To get clicks back to the link(s) provided in the resource section of the article where you are permitted to say a bit about yourself and your website, or offer more information on the subject of the article. There are specific ways in which the resource can be optimized for best results.

c) To get exposure on Google through an article directory page containing the article being listed. It is possible to get page 1 exposure for the article containing your URL this way, and the more submissions you make the better.

A potential downside of web article marketing involving a large number of directories and ezines is not duplicate content but a sudden rush of links back to your web page. Google looks suspiciously on this, and it is better to trickle-submit, spacing a submission to over 400 directories and ezines over between one week and three months. That's right, three months!

That doesn't mean that you write one article and then wait three months before writing another. You can write three or four a week, but focusing on different keywords and different pages of your website. In that way you are trickling a large number of articles focused on a variety of keywords and web pages into the system. You will benefit from links to pages deeper in your site than just your home page, and Google will reward you for it.

Duplicate content is less of an issue since Google appears to tolerate some degree of duplication for a while in respect of article directory content, and you will get the benefit of duplicate submissions for several weeks before duplicates begin to fall off the listings.

Web article marketing and article distribution have to be carried out properly and authoritatively for it to succeed, but if you can achieve that then it is free advertising and free exposure on search engines for which many people pay thousands of dollars. And that's something everybody can use!