Is writing articles and directory submissions for suckers?

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Mar 18, 2008
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St George, UT
Nearly every "SEO Expert" expounds on the value of articles and directory submissions for backlinks and traffic. Is it all bullshit?

My purely cynical n00b self says keyword rich articles get more traffic for GoArticles or Ezinearticles then they get for me. If content if freakin' king then wouldn't it be better if all these articles were on my site?

Directories, in general, are no authority link farms. Google has devalued some and will devalue others. Is it worth it to submit to 324125345345 directories for $19.95?

Seems to me that the white-hattiest to build a site is with content and the rest is just varying shades of gray.

Or am I wrong?
 


Your questions is too vauge.. If articles publishing were so creepy things. why wud people go post them on these article directories.

understood. that not all articles dirs are authoritative.. but those which are .. are going to get you a quality back link which is wht makes all the difference when search engines like Google assigns page rank.

getting traffic wud certainly mean you need to do quite a lot of marketing without which nothing works..there are plenty around the net offering quality permanent links for money.. spending cash wisely wud get you to top spot in short time frame..

hope it helps.. rest .. research & experience counts..

Virtual
 
They are just two different variety of linkbacks to your site. You need a wide variety of linkbacks to stay natural and get ranked.
 
Your question is similar to asking, "if a company already ranks #1 in google for a keyword, why do they bid on it?"

Because it's more profitable to spend 5 cents on the click than to allow that visitor to find a competitor.

Article directories give you another opportunity to rank your content and create an entrance to your site. You need momentum to become one of the "big sites" that can rely on the value of their own content for success.
 
Your question is similar to asking, "if a company already ranks #1 in google for a keyword, why do they bid on it?"

Because it's more profitable to spend 5 cents on the click than to allow that visitor to find a competitor.

Article directories give you another opportunity to rank your content and create an entrance to your site. You need momentum to become one of the "big sites" that can rely on the value of their own content for success.

So, if I understand this right, this is a way to drive initial traffic to a site and gain some traction and some returning visitors.

A way of getting your site to walk so it can run?
 
People use article submissions for different reasons. Some do it for the visitors who come to their sites from clicking the links in their articles' resources boxes. But, some simply want the link juice from authoritative web properties.

SEO grandmasters, correct me if I'm wrong here...

Let's say you want your site to rank in Google for "blogging tips." Google likes to rank sites that have authoritative, themed (not always, though) sites linking to them.

So, you'd find authoritative sites and submit your article about "blogging" to them. If published, your article would include a resource box with a link that includes the anchor text "blogging tips." Now you have an article on an authoritative, themed site linking to your similarly-themed site with the anchor text for which you want to rank.

Most people submit to ezinearticles, goarticles, etc. And that's fine. But, to really leverage the method, you can try to create kick-butt, high-quality articles and submit them to sites that are already ranked for your key phrase.

In the above example, that means submitting your article about blogging to bloggingtips.com, problogger.net and dailyblogtips.com.

It's a different game than most play and usually requires much higher-quality content than the tripe you'll find throughout ezinearticles.

Hope that gives you some ideas.
 
For me it's about 2 things
1)Backlinks, obviously
2)On a WH site, I normally want to rank for more keywords than is advisable. So I create pages on article sites that will inevitably lead them back to my real site ranking for those keywords. Since they've got enough link juice to spread around, it can normally rank easily for not-so competitive terms. So I don't burn time.
 
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