We get this question a lot and it’s really a bit of a loaded question, because it brings some baggage along with it. The top article submission sites question that we so frequently get implies that you can just pick a few and submit to them. But does that work?
Quality or Quantity?
This brings up the inherent debate between ‘quality’ versus ‘quantity’. These are really two completely opposite beliefs on how to best practice article marketing. At one extreme is the ‘quality’ camp. They believe that you can just pick half a dozen or so top article directories and submit top quality articles to them and that the quality of the writing will attract people to their sites. In the other camp are the quantity believers. At the extreme are the spammers that just are ridiculous about it, but let’s bypass them for the sake of this discussion. The quantity believers tend to not worry so much about the article quality and typically will outsource the writing and then submit it to hundreds of sites. Though not necessarily always the case, the quality camp tends to think that article spinning is a waste of time and the quantity camp tends to think of it as the best thing since sliced bread.
The Quality Argument
Those that believe in quality over quantity will tell you that a well written article will build rapport in the minds of the reader and a well crafted resource box will send them flying to your site. They also tend to practice article marketing with the belief that the articles themselves are what will bring traffic to their site from click-throughs. The problem with logic is simply that we live in an instant gratification, Nintendo society that just isn’t that likely to read an entire article and then click through to your site. Does it happen? Sure it does – you will get some click-throughs for sure, but is it a sustainable long term traffic strategy? Is that really where you want your SEO budget being spent – to give EzineArticles more unique content and free back links?
The problems with this strategy are many. First of all you don’t control the site that you’re putting all of your unique quality content onto. Tomorrow Ezine Articles.com could decide to make all of your links NoFollow and the 2,700 articles you have up there could be greatly devalued over night. Secondly, they do everything they can to prevent people from even seeing the resource boxes. Many article directories hide the resource boxes in between Adsense or make the links virtually indistinguishable or a host of other tricks. The fact of the matter is that they make money on Adsense revenue. They want their visitors to click on ads, not your links.
But the biggest problem with this believe is that the numbers simply do not backup the belief. Even top authors with hundreds of articles just do not get very much traffic from the article directories. Gone are the days when you could just write an EzineArticles.com article and throw it up there and compete with page #1 search results. Now, before I get all of the floods of email, let me clarify that point. There are lots of first page EzineArticles.com listings, but if you look closely what most people are doing today is treating EzineArticles as a web 2.0 property. They publish an article and then go out and linkbuild to it to get it improved rankings. Now, that does work, but we’d much rather have those links coming to our money site rather than a site that we do not control and could easily throw a monkey wrench into all of our efforts.
A Better Approach…
A much better approach is to use Article Marketing as a link generation tactic, not a direct traffic mechanism. Notice I said “direct traffic mechanism” because by focusing on article marketing for link generation, you will focus on moving target keywords up the SERPS and that will definitely bring you more traffic – it’s just an “indirect” result of the article, not a direct click through to your site.
Things change over time. Strategies that worked 5 years ago aren’t necessarily so effective today. Napster was huge, not so any more. My space was huge, now it’s Facebook. The fact is that things evolve and article marketing, well, effective article marketing has also evolved. With great article submitters available today such as our two favorites – Article Demon and Article Marketing Robot – you can send your article to thousands of directories. And each and every distribution will have a link in it pointing back to your site. In our opinion this is a much better approach than hoping to get a very small sliver of traffic from an ever diminishing source like article click thruough’s.
Another reason that the old style article marketing is not as effective is that Google algorithms change all of the time as well. In the old style of article marketing you would typically write a quality unique article and submit it to Ezine Articles.com, for example. You would likely be taught to go target a very long tail keyword phrase in the title of your article to chase a listing. The problem is that Google has changed a lot of these long tail algorithms and it’s not as easy as it used to be. The strategy is just not nearly as effective as it once was.
Benefits of Article Marketing for SEO
When you distribute your article out to hundreds of directories or even thousands, you have some unique opportunities. What most people will do is use an article spinner such as The Best Spinner to spin out different title variations to target different keywords as well as spinning of the anchor text of the links in order to target more keywords and maintain a more natural looking link profile. Generally they will also spin the full body of the article as well, though this is not as critical. The main reason for spinning the full content is for acceptance by the article directories – it is not because of some supposed duplicate content myth – that fallacy has long sense been put to bed (Google has recently announced they will be placing further de-emphasis on duplicate content – but by no means is it a penalty). But being pragmatic about it, some directories will simply not accept duplicate content, so some degree of spinning will improve your distribution acceptance rates.
Summary
Content is expensive. If you’re writing it yourself, well, it takes a lot of time (ask me how I know as I’m just passing 1000 words into this blog post). You can (and should) outsource it, but then the costs add up. So either way you go, content is expensive. Our philosophy is to re-purpose that content and turn it into as many opportunities to create links for us as we can. By spinning it and using various distribution networks to get the content out there, we can be much more efficient with our content needs and much more productive as well.
Just do the math. If you write one article at a cost of $10 let’s say and submit it to Ezine
Articles for the two links you get in the resource box, well, you just paid $5.00 a link. Now if instead you invested say $20 in a spun article and submit it out to hundreds of directories, you’re likely to get a couple hundred or more links. Let’s be very, very conservative and say you only get 100 links. Still, that is 20 cents a link – much, much more economical per link than going to just a single (or a few) article directories.
Furthermore it is our feeling that the best article submission sites are really article submission services or products instead.
