Article Submission Strategy

So what's the best way to jumpstart your article submission program? Just follow the tips below.

Article Submission Strategy Tip #1: Identify Article Sites

It's important that the article site has a specific category that fits well with your business. Most article sites are broken down by specific topic so it is easy to determine if there are topics that match your customer segments.

There are two main types of article sites; general purpose and industry specific. The general purpose sites look to publish articles on just about any topic you can imagine. The industry specific article sites focus on a particular area.

An example of an industry specific site would be Small Business Brief, which focuses articles on helping the small business owner. Some of the most popular generic article sites are Ezine Articles, Article City, Idea Marketers, Article Dashboard, and ArticleBiz.

A good article submission strategy will utilize both specific and generic article sites. Start with identifying your industry specific sites and then look to add a generic site or two to round out your list.

Avoid using article submission software to submit your articles automatically to hundreds of sites. In the long run, this is simply not an effective approach. Instead, limit the number of article sites you select to 5 or 6. Submitting to a few high quality sites is better than submitting dozens (or hundreds) of mediocre sites.

Article Submission Strategy Tip #2: Select Articles Sites with High PR

The search engines pick up on this in-pointing link to your site and this adds to your overall link popularity. Remember, the more relevant incoming links you have to your site, the more momentum your site will achieve with the search engines. This makes submitting articles a great strategy since not only are you building credibility with your core audience, but you are increasing the number of links pointing back to your site.

Here's the point to keep in mind. Everything else being equal, it's better to have incoming links from sites that have a higher PageRank score than yours. PageRank is a proprietary scoring system whereby Google determines the overall relevancy of your site. Although there's not always a one-to-one correspondence, sites that have a higher PageRank tend to do much better in the organic search engine results.

When you choose an article site, try to choose one with PageRank score higher than yours. This will mean a "higher authority" site is pointing back to your site. The search engines see that as a vote of confidence and it adds value faster than a bunch of incoming links from sites that have low PageRank.

PageRank (also known as "Toolbar" PageRank) is measured on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest score. You can easily monitor the PageRank of your site as well as others by using the link below.

Article Submission Strategy Tip #3: Avoiding Duplicate Content

Let's say you wrote an article on the factors to consider when hiring an accountant. You select keywords relating to this and then you write your article and post it on your site. You then find a higher PageRank article site and submit the exact article. When searchers are looking for this topic, the search engines (Google for example) will usually find this duplicate content. When they do, they will make a decision on which artcile should be listed in the search rankings and which one should be left out or pushed lower in the rankings.

In Google's case, all other factors being equal, they will typically display results from higher PageRank sites. This means your site may not rank for your original content which is duplicated elsewhere.

Some people argue that this isn't necessarily a problem. After all, if someone comes across your Ezine Article content from a Google search, they could still come to your site by clicking on a link from within the article. Type "duplicate content problems" into Google to read more about this topic.

Of course, in the future, search engines will probably be able to determine which website published the content first and give that site priority in the search listings. Until that happens, it's my opinion that it's better to be safe and avoid publishing duplicate content whenever possible.

Here's my recommendation.

When you have some content on your site that you want to publish as an external article, spend a little time rewriting it so that it won't be tagged as duplicate content by the search engines. Here are a few guidelines for doing this.

• Select a different article title
• Completely rewrite the first and last paragraph
• Reword the first sentence of the middle paragraphs
• Cut some content and/or add new content

Although it takes a little extra time to do this, I feel the results are worth it.

By the way, it is ok to submit the very same article to your selected article sites. The search engines know how to handle duplicate content found in various article networks. If they didn't, then all the news-related sites that simply pick up their content from elsewhere would be penalized.

If you are not writing original content for your article sites, just follow the above rules and you'll be fine.

Article Submission Strategy Tip #4: Link Back to Your Site

One of my favorite strategies is to make sure the original article on my site contains more information that I'm providing in my submitted article. This allows me to link back to the original article on my site for more information. This is a great strategy since it provides a link deeper into my site (called a Deep Link.) The search engines like to see these deep links.

I would also recommend you link back to your home page and, if you have one, your blog. Ultimately, you can decide which pages you want to link back to. Just remember to use anchor text in your links that describe your page appropriately. Putting your main keyword into the anchor text adds relevancy to the link.

One additional strategy I recommend is to vary the anchor text used in your bio links. The variety in anchor text will help your rankings in the search engines.

Article Submission Strategy Tip #5: Submitting Your Article

It's important to come up with a publishing schedule that fits your needs and stick with it. Maybe your goal is to submit one article per week. Maybe you only have time to submit an article once every two weeks. That's perfectly fine. Whatever your schedule, stick with it.

Developing a good article submission strategy is important for every small business owner. It's one of the few strategies that works on two levels; to increase your expert status and to provide quality inbound links.

So don't waste another minute - start submitting today!