How To Write Articles

Welcome to my article writing tips lenses. This is will be the main showplace for some of my other work that involves helping people learn to write effective articles for article marketing.

Article writing can be difficult for those new to the concept. I specialize in helping the writer make the article more search engine friendly and help them drive more traffic to their website.

Writing in itself can be difficult, but when you add the different variables that you will encounter while writing online the more you know about the way search engines work and how to properly link and format your articles then the better your chances for success.

Online writing requires at least a basic knowledge of HTML...This allows you to learn how to place links and get the proper anchor text hyperlinked.

You'll also learn how to avoid wasting your time by submitting to inferior quality article sites. Some of the sites out there are not setup to rank well in the search engines and thus your article doesn't get the exposure it needs.

The internet offers all sorts of article submission services. These services basically allow a writer to automatically send their work to hundreds or even thousands of article sites.

The question: Is this a good idea? I personally do not use these sorts of services and prefer to manually submit to articles sites that meet my criteria.

Some people argue that articles submitted to multiple sites constitutes "duplicate content", however this is not the case. Duplicate content occurs within your own site and should be avoided to increase your search engine ranking. There is actually no such thing as a duplicate content penalty within Google...The problem is that Google will automatically determine the best of the duplicate content and index that.

You may or may not see the content that you desired to be indexed. In rare occasions, the duplicate content will be indexed and result in diluting your pagerank.

Duplicate content is not a problem when submitting to multiple sites as long as you include a link back to the article source in the articles.

There are other considerations to watch for with submitting to multiple sites.One such thing to be aware of is a sudden influx of inbound links. If the search engines suddenly find several inbound links this can appear as a text buying or linking exchange scheme.

I have used mass submission services before and have been disappointed with the results. I find that the site I'm promoting will get knocked down in the search results. In essence, a sudden influx of links does not appear as natural link building and can trigger a loss of rank to your site.

Another problem with mass submitting articles is the fact that I have found the sites submitted to may no longer exist. The broken links do not necessarily hurt your site, but they don't help you either. It is very difficult for submission services to keep their lists updated and offer a clean list for submission.

Lets also take a look at the ability to control the relevance of the sites that will end up pointing to you. I have found backlinks obtained via submission services don't always relate to my site. The search engines can not penalize you for this, but once again we can see that the overall effectiveness of this strategy doesn't give you the ability to obtain quality backlinks.

As I stated before, I manually submit my articles to individual sites that I can easily examine and determine the quality of the links that I place there. I'm convinced that this is the absolute best way to operate.

Even with manual submission, you will obtain more backlinks from people that syndicate your articles on their sites. This is not a problem and can lead to some great links as well. At least you know that they got your article from a good site and thus you have the benefit of the editorial review by the site.

Another thought on mass submission, I have found that with this strategy, the links you obtain can be short lived. Search engines tend to treat the articles much like a news article that may only be relevant for a few days. This means that you will have to constantly work to keep fresh content to resubmit.In my opinion, it is just as easy to manually submit fresh articles as it is to blast a stream of short lived articles out to the web.

Perhaps the biggest "hair in my bread" with article submission is that you lose the ability to participate in revenue sharing with sites that offer that feature.

Your submissions will be sent to these sites and you will find it very difficult to go to each and everyone of them to create an account for revenue sharing because the sites usually submit your content under a common user name or email.

Manual submission allows you to find sites that offer revenue sharing and sign up to receive ad revenues from your work. Manually submitting allows you the opportunity to leverage your earnings potential and track the revenues you receive from a particular site.

If you are going to write articles, then make them earn you money by always taking advantage of revenue sharing.

You work very hard to write quality articles to submit to article directories. Do you know if the bio links you place in that article are passing pagerank? There are literally thousands on article directories that place "nofollow" link attributes in bio links. This means that those links are ignored by the major search engines when they rank your site.

Most people do not realize that this is occurring, and submit to these sites under the assumption that the backlink to their site will help their search engine rankings. If you are lucky enough to submit to a site that does not nofollow your link, then you will see results. If you fall into the nofollowed link trap then you have just created content for the directory owner and you will only gain some direct traffic and not see organic search traffic.

How can you deal with the nofollow link attributes...simple. Get the Knofollo Extension and use it to check each article directory that you wish to submit to. You can even check the distribution list for article submission services to make sure they are submitting to article directories that do not use the nofollow attribute in the author's bio.

The Knofollo Extension allows you to easily see if the article directory or webpage you want to submit to have used nofollow link attributes in their page. This tool is invaluable if you manually submit articles. You can easily built a list of preferred directories that pass pagerank to your site via your bio links. Hey..If you are gonna write, make sure you get the most out of your work.

So you want to be an article writer...first thing you will need is to find some quality article sites to submit your articles to.

Here is some of the methods that I use:

Use the Alexa Search feature to find high traffic sites. Go to their site here: Alexa and search for article related keywords such as "article directories" or "article sites".

The results returned will show you the traffic ranking for the sites and some of the sites will even be directories that list top sites themselves.

You can mouse over the ranking link and you can see the sites traffic ranking and get an idea how popular the site is.

You can also get a traffic ranking report for your own website. I use my website ranking to help me select the sites that I want to submit my writing to. My strategy is to try to always submit to sites that are better than mine in the traffic rankings.

High traffic sites can help you generate direct referrals from your article as well as help boost your search rankings. One thing that you need to consider is that a very high ranked will usually provide you will a quick boost in the rankings, and then as more articles are added after yours, you may see the effects of your article getting pushed onto pages in the site that are not ranked as well as the page it will initially appear on.

I highly recommend that you use the spreadsheet feature in Google Documents to track your submissions and save your work. I have a detailed list of sites that I submit to and all the details such as the anchor text used and title of the article.

Another way to find article sites is to do a search for key phrases such as the powered by "xyz articles" that is usually included in a site's footer. Simply find a site and then check to see if a particular software or company is listed as the designer of that site.

Perform a exact phrase search by enclosing the text in double quotes and the search results should give you a list of similar sites. This is especially handy if you find a well designed article directory and want to submit to others sites that have the same features and or setup.

Submitting your writing to quality sites is absolutely necessary to prevent wasting time with inferior or poorly designed sites. The Alexa site is a great way to sort through the inferior sites.

Once you find a decent looking site, be sure to check the author bio links for nofollow attributes with the Knofollo Firefox Extension that I described above.

Good luck and go find those quality sites.