I have been quite busy over the last week or so readying my new site for launch. I will be offering existing and new clients article marketing services in order to help them with their search engine placements as well as generating organic traffic from the indexed articles themselves. I have been doing some test work for some clients to find directories that accept articles in a timely fashion as well as those that seem to have their articles republished quite regularly.
One customer actually brought up a great point about article marketing that took me a bit of research to not only answer but to keep the project on track. During his own research he noted that some of the article directories had begun to change the hard links that you embed into your articles into “NOFOLLOW” links. I had never noticed this before but when I did look at one of my favorite article directories, I did notice that all their links did have this dreaded relation tag.
Initially discouraged I started doing some investigating and found that while a few of the big directories did change their links to “NOFOLLOW”, there are tons out there with great PR value to submit to. As I assembled my list of directories I have come across close to a hundred currently operating and I know there are tons of smaller ones available that I just haven’t had a chance to investigate as of yet. While some may have changed their links, there is no shortage of article directories to submit to.
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Secondly, while popular directories that have switched to the “NOFOLLOW” model, any articles republished from the directory on other blogs and websites do not carry this relative tag, meaning you will still get the benefit of created backlinks. For instance, a recent article I published on VPS hosting was republished 26 times by other webmasters (that I could find) meaning I created 26 backlinks from a single 300 word article.
Lastly, the big article directories are favorites of the major search engines so if you have decent and relative articles, you have an opportunity to create organic traffic. I had one particular customer order a test batch and he was quite impressed when the article I wrote explaining his affiliate program started bringing in 20 – 25 unique hits per day as it was indexed 4 days after it was published. The organic traffic that relevant and well-written articles is an ancillary benefit of article marketing for SEO purposes.
Overall things are coming along well and my plan is to primarily market the site through article marketing. If I’m selling it to my clients it only makes sense that I have confidence in this type of service to help promote my own site, doesn’t it?