Internet Article Marketing and Article Directories
Article Marketing is a form of advertising which is used to promote a company's products and services through the use of articles appearing in print media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, journals) and the practice has been extended to the Internet where article directories exist for such activity.
In year 2009, I wrote a series of stock market related articles to promote a web service that I created for stock market traders. Most of the material from that venture now resides in the stock market segment of this site.
There are two fundamental benefits of Internet Article Marketing:
I returned to the use of Internet Article Marketing and made submissions to article directories to promote my present web properties. I dug out my old list of article directories and reviewed their current state of operations. Here is my short list:
| Article Directory | PageRank | Alexa Traffic Rank |
|---|---|---|
| EzineArticles | 6 | 325 |
| ArticlesBase | 6 | 1,346 |
| SelfGrowth | 6 | 4,663 |
| ArticleAlley | 4 | 7,726 |
| ArticleCube | 4 | 13,647 |
| A1Articles | 4 | 18,515 |
PageRank (higher is better) shows Google recognition and Alexa Traffic Rank (lower is better) is an estimate of popularity calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months.
Each article directory has its own set of rules and editorial guidelines. They all follow the traditional use of the Author Bio section which typically appears at the end of the article. Links with anchor text may be used in the Author Bio section as well as the body of the article subject to the rules of the particular article directory (e.g. the number of links, relevancy).
I continue to seek out other article directories because they provide me with additional opportunities to submit articles. My selection of article directories is based on ease of use, turnaround time for article approval, stringency of rules & editorial guidelines along with the resulting traffic and SEO performance for my web properties.
From an SEO standpoint, some provide dofollow links while others provide nofollow links, or a combination of the two. This distinction is noted to the extent that anyone really knows the significance and impact of dofollow versus nofollow. Google keeps their algorithm for PageRank and SERP rankings private in an attempt to avoid people gaming the system. Google also is constantly adjusting their algorithm which consists of 200+ factors to improve their search results and also has the effect to keep "gamers" guessing.
I use Google Webmaster Tools to monitor inbound links in addition to other metrics pertinent to my placement in Google search results. I look forward to seeing the backlinks from my Internet Article Marketing activities and their contribution to my backlink building exercise to elevate my rankings in SERP.
I use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic coming from the article directories as well as search engines. This along with Google Webmaster Tools allows me confirm the two key benefits of Internet Article Marketing - attracting visitor traffic and achieving backlinks for SEO.
Here are examples of my submissions to article directories:
EzineArticles Computing, Round and Round We GoArticlesBase Smartphones, Technology and Progress
See this related page on the use of Scribd for document sharing.
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