ARTICLE MARKETING: A Purist Approach To SEO & Brand-Building

Many successful online marketers will tell you that article marketing is the most effective free traffic generation strategies going. The reasons are many, but at the heart of them all lies the simple fact that article marketing is as organic in nature as the internet itself. Article reprints build internet-wide credibility, pre-sell products, direct targeted traffic to your site, and build a web of inbound links — all in one fell swoop.

And there's no shortage of article directories which don't charge authors a submission fee — currently more than 200 general interest directories and at least a thousand niche directories. Many of these directories boast solid PageRanks, typically between PR 4 to PR 8. Inbound links from sites with high PageRanks make you popular. Popularity boosts your PageRank. Higher PageRank postions you higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). And popularity builds brand.

Article directories such as iSnare, ArticlesDashboard and GoArticles aggregate massive article databases, categorized by topic. These directories function as sort of reprint clearinghouses for authors who wish to submit articles, and for other publishers seeking free content to reprint on their sites. Articles are tagged with an About The Author resource box, which includes a brief bio and links to the author's website. And that little resource box, with its keywords and links to your site is the best reason to reprint your articles.

When you investigate an article directory, read the site's About page to determine which article sites are included in this directory's network. This can save considerable time and effort, especially if you're contributing general interest articles that would be welcome on a wide variety of sites. In other words, you don't want to waste time submitting to the individual directories that belong to a particular network when you can make one submission at the "parent" site, then let the parent site distribute your content to relevant sister sites.

For example, Article Alley's network includes A1 Articles, Women's Articles, Index Plex, Article Heaven, Going Legal, Finance Alley. Some sites, such as iSnare, are both article directory search engines and article distribution service providers, which means they'll distribute your article across their publishers network — article announcement lists and article distribution lists.

Don't let anyone tell you different. Don't distribute drivel. Most article directories have human editors, though some are more discriminating than others. Solid, informative, carefully SEO'd articles will always translate to higher click-throughs, and ultimately higher conversions.

And there are other perks. Thoughtful, well-written articles will earn you Expert Author status, which gets you a slot on the directory's high-traffic home page for at least a day or two. We've seen phenomenal results from a single day's worth of traffic from sites like EzineArticles. EzineArticles also adds Expert Authors to their RSS feed and proprietary Email Alert Members. Your article is instantly handed to hundreds — if not thousands — of potential prospects.

The success of any article will hinge on many factors — from the quality of your writing and the informational value you provide to the number of people who choose your article from a search engine's SERPs or from the article directory itself.

Article directories may be slowly but surely replacing search directories in terms of the influence they have on SERPs position. Credibility, PageRank, inbound links and traffic are co-dependents.

A single article directory can offer authors an infinite supply of one-way, inbound links. (Multiply that by the number of article directories out there… you see where this is going, don't you?) Assuming your site's onpage factors are optimized, wrangling even one inbound link from a ranked site (ideally PR4 or better) will boost your PageRank in all three major search engines, which, of course, increases your free traffic.

Reprints provide an inbound link(s) from the reprint directory, plus multiplicative inbound links from sites that reprint the reprint. And these author links are typically anchor text, which is a key factor in the methods search engines use to rank search strings. Even though the directories' actual article pages are typically only ranked between PR 0 and PR 3, anchor text links can boost an author's site, particularly one that may be struggling in the SERPs due to a dearth of relevant anchor text links.

Reprint directories are topically organized, which means that article pages typically include bold category heads — a key onpage factor used by search engines to assess relevance. Including relevant keywords in the article's title (and in the HTML title, if the two are different) further convinces search engines of the article's relevance to a particular topic.

Reprints Pre-Sell & Build Brand
Reprints increase the odds of converting shoppers to customers. Author credibility is pre-established at the point of origin — the article directory. If someone clicks through to your site from your your Author Resource link, they're interested in hearing more of what you have to say. They're already partially sold, and hopefully, your site was designed to close the sale. Reprints put you one step closer to conversion than you would be if the visitor merely arrived at your site through a search engine SERPs link.

Generally, you want the original article (posted on your site) to turn up higher in SERPs than its reprints, so that your original is perceived as the authoritative version. Plus, one of the primary goals, of course, is to drive traffic to your site. But you do want to manage the distribution of your duplicate content carefully to avoid being penalized by the search engines. For advice on avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties, see our related story: The Infamous Duplicate Content Theories.)

Reprints do have one interesting advantage over the original, authoritative article. Reprints, which appear on neutral, unbiased article directory sites, carry the presumption of endorsement by the article directory, which helps establish you as an expert in a subliminal way that would be impossible to pull off on your own site.

Even if your reprint readers don't click-through to your site, your brand has been imprinted, your message communicated…one more time. Repetition breeds awareness and credibility, perhaps even celebrity. That's how brand is built.