In my earlier post I talked about the basics of article marketing, the concept of using articles you write to spread links to your site or affiliate link around the article directories. The purpose being to draw surfers from the article directories to your link and to spread some links around so that the search engines will notice them and take them into account when working out when to list your site in search engine results.

You may also see a third benefit if your articles are well written. This happens when other site owners looking for content take your article and use it on their own sites. I’ve even had an article picked up by a printed publication which I had not actually intended but was quite chuffed about, at least they gave prominent mention of my site so i got some visitors.

The benefit of having your articles spread around for you is the same as before, more links equals more gateways into your site or affiliate link so more surfers and more chance for the SE’s to notice you. There is a lot of talk on whether you should bother with sites that have “nofollow” links. These are links which carry a nofollow attribute telling the search engines NOT to follow the link. For our purposes we can ignore this for now at least. Not all SE’s treat them the same way and catching the attention of the SE’s is not our primary goal.

So where should you submit your lovingly created articles? We all have our favorites and I’m willing to bet Ezinearticles is the most popular of the traditional article directories. This is because Ezine has been around for ages and has lots of surfers daily because the SE’s love its huge content base. It is also one of the more difficult sites to get published on as the folks there are protective of their baby. This is actually a good thing for us in the longer run!

Popular Places to Submit Articles:

Now the last few need special attention as we use them a little differently to the traditional article directories, I’ll come back to them in the next post.