SEO Basics: Write Articles to Help Build Relevance and Links

8 09 2007

There are many article directories on the web these days, and many websites that accept free article submissions as well. But how do articles help your website rank for keywords?

Ok, here’s an example: I have a website about cats, and I know that building quality relevant links to my website will help it in the search results. But most of the time, that’s eaiser said than done. Writing articles about your topic is one way that you can accomplish this. Here are some ideas for keyword rich articles for my “cats” website-

Caring for Your Cat
Feeding Cats: What’s the Healthiest Cat Food?
Grooming Your Cat

I have a list of general article directories I will publish in my next post, but most are free, and they all accept articles that are allowed to have an outbound link near the bottom (the Author Bio). It will be even better for my “cat” articles if I can find niche websites about cats that accept article submissions. If you’re considering a website for submitting an article, make sure they allow a link to your site, and make sure that the link doesn’t contain the “rel=’nofollow’” attribute. That attribute tells Google not to pass PR down to the site that is linked to.

Some people will submit the same article or slight variations to hundreds of article directories… I don’t think that helps much. Search engines today are very aware of “duplicate content,” and work hard to weed it out. They try to determine the original source of the content, and then copies get penalized in the search results. So I say, submit your articles once to the most appropriate website. Quite often, the articles themselves will achieve decent search engine rankings, and can bring in natural traffic to your site that way as well.

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Date : 8 September 2007
Categories : Search Engine Optimization

2 responses to “SEO Basics: Write Articles to Help Build Relevance and Links”

6 12 2007: Chris (18:10:39) :

How do you determine the most appropriate directory to submit to? They all seem to be the same, with the exception that certain ones a much better than others. Therefore, wouldn’t you always be submitting to the same one or two directories?
6 12 2007: Chris H. (19:49:43) :

The best ones are more selective. I’m not sure if it’s on my list, but Buzzle.com is probably more selective than the other ones I have listed. Smaller, more related niche directories are better as well. Ezinearticles.com may be more selective than some of those. It’s good to have a presence in many places though too.

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