MoreNiche Affiliate SEO Tutorials

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A Guide to SEO Article Submission for Affiliate Marketing

This tutorial will guide you through the process of article submission. Article submission is a great SEO technique that can help your site get more traffic, more backlinks and higher positions in the SERPs but if you don’t do it right you will be wasting your time and even worse, may risk getting your site penalised.

The most important rule of article submission is to create quality, original content. So many people ignore this simple step but creating a good article is simply the most important part of all. How do make “quality content”? That’s pretty simple too.

Writing Your Article

Firstly your content should fulfill its purpose, whether that be answer a question or explain to the reader how to complete a task or understand a technique. This may be aimed at beginners or experts but it still needs to help the reader in the expected way.

Secondly it needs to be the right length. If it’s too short people will find the article unfulfilling, if it’s too long your readership will loose interest. Because the subject of articles, and therefore their complexity, greatly differs an exact word count to aim for is a little redundant but try to make your article between 500 and 1500 words.

Thirdly spelling and grammar should be in check. This is so important if you want to hold a decent reputation as a copywriter and it strongly affects the experience of reading your articles. Pieces written in broken English (or any language) come across as untrustworthy and unprofessional so make sure you double check and read through your article on completion.

Fourthly your article should be in a program that allows you to paste it into the article directory submission forms. This usually means no Word or other word process type programs. This is because copying text in those programs copies code that determines the styles of the text which will count as code to the submission form and result in your article being rejected. Your best bet is to write it in Notepad and paste it into Word to check for spelling errors and then make manual adjustments.

Finally the article should be original. No stealing content from other authors, magazines or websites. Not only is plagiarism a crime it’s grossly unfair and will not offer long standing SEO benefits.

Preparing you Article for Submission

Once you have written your article you can prepare it for submission. You will need to write 3 additional sections for your article especially design for article submission; I will walk you through each of them below

The article title is so often overlooked. It is important for a number of reasons including capturing readers and traffic, often providing a basis for the URL and providing the title element of the HTML document.

You title should be between five and fifteen words and accurately convey what your article is about while including keywords that your are targeting. Here is an example, imagine I am naming this article;

"Article Submission" is a bad title, it helps you understand what the document is but no-one else can discern its purpose.

"A Guide to how Article Submission Can Help with SEO" is much better; it tells the potential reader the context and subject of the article and managers to get keywords in.

You should prepare 3 different titles so you can mix them up when submitting to the different directories. This will help your content seem more unique and prevent you getting a large amount of backlinks from similar sources.

This section can also be referred to as the summary, abstract, description or annotation. It also means the same thing and you will need to write a short (less than 500 characters) description about your article. It should explain what the article is about and who it is aimed at and ultimately try to draw readers in.

You don’t need to repeat your title in this section but remember to include some keywords inside your introduction. You should consider writing three variations of this too in order to add more variation to your article submission.

This section is where you usually get to put your links. You will need to write an adequate author bio first however. This means you need to write a 200-400 character description about yourself and include keywords to link back to your site with. Most article submission site will allow the basic HTML necessary to do an anchored link and the ones that don’t you can change on the fly.

Writing a few variations of this section is essential; it will help vary your anchor text and prevent Google’s over optimisation filter kicking in against you.

Submitting Your Article

The actual submission process is very easy, you simply take your list of directories, (I recommend check out directory critic for one of these), and go down the list submitting to the necessary ones. Please note that all directories have their own little rules and be sure to follow them if you want your article approving and placing live.

The basics that most enforce are;

• Links only allowed in author bio
• Must have an account or provide real name to submit
• Minimum words count of 400
• Duplicate content check
• Only basic HTML allowed

Be sure to look through each directories category list and submit to the most appropriate one, many sites have subcategories too so make sure you look carefully, it will do your article a lot more good to be in the right category from both and SEO and traffic driving perspective.

A question I commonly get asked about this part of the process is “how many different article directories should I submit too?” It’s a tricky one as you want to get as much SEO benefit out of your article as possible but you don’t want to ruin it.

I suggest you submit to between 20-30 directories at a time. That means that your first article goes to the first 30 directories on your list and you then make a new article to go to directories 31-60 and so on. This will keep your inbound links fresh and varied and will also stop your article being over syndicated.

That’s pretty much it for article submission. Just remember to uphold the quality of your articles and don’t over syndicate them or spam the article directories, those tactics will only bring negative results if anything at all.

We hope you enjoyed the article and find it useful for your affiliate marketing stratergies. If you want more webmaster advice and want to promote an exclusive selection of products with great commission come in and join us today for free!