SEO Tips Australia

One of the best ways to improve your site's off site optimization is to submit quality, informative articles including a link or two back to your site to various article directories. While some directories allow you to include a link in the body of your article, most don't, and will only allow one in the author bio-box. This is still very valuable.

Some webmasters write and submit articles shamelessly promoting their websites and/or services. This is not recommended. Firstly, this might result in your article getting denied. But even if it doesn't, it's still a bad strategy.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, people usually searching the article directories (or running Google searches including the keyword "article") are usually looking for information. If they see that the article they've found is nothing more than an extended advertisement, they will tend to look elsewhere.

Secondly, one of the main reasons for submitting your articles to these directories is so that other webmasters will use them on their sites, including the bio-box link (which is a condition of the use). Webmasters are very unlikely to publish what is basically an ad for another, competing, website on theirs. Needless to say, there's no point in helping to promote the competition.

They will, however, publish useful, more generalized information that their readers might find useful, accepting that a link to a competitor in the bio-box as the price they pay for the content. And it's those links that help you, the article writer, since some of the those reading your articles reproduced on other sites will click on them and view your site. Also, they go into Google's calculation of the quality and relevance of your site and improve its SEO. If you do want to write articles overtly promoting your services, then there are numerous online press release directories you can submit to.

But back to the article directories: The best ones I have found so far are Ezine Articles, Go Articles and Article Dashboard.

Ezine Articles is perhaps the best for SEO purposes. However, it does take quite a while for the editors to review and approve your articles, particularly if you have only just joined. Once you have had 10 articles approved, the process speeds up considerably. It is still quite slow, though. 

Article Dashboard is a bit quicker. But it still takes a few days at least before your articles go live and get indexed by the search engines.

Go Articles is the quickest. Your articles go live more or less straightaway.

When submitting your articles to these and other directories like them, remember to use your chosen keywords in the titles. Put the most important ones at the front of the title if possible. And you should also put your main keyword a couple of times in the first paragraph. Sprinkle it through the rest of the article body, but don't overdo it.

Articles are also very useful for on-site optimization, since Google just loves informative, unique content. So make sure that you use only your own words on your site. Using the same article there and in an article directory is not recommended. However, if you are going to do this, then publish it on your site first. Then give it a couple of weeks before submitting it elsewhere. Do that, and it will be indexed on your site first, and the article directory will suffer the "duplicate content" penalty (which is not as harsh as it sounds; it just means the copy will be filtered out of search results, or - more likely - appear lower on the list). Whatever you do, don't write and submit an article to a directory, then publish it unaltered on your site. You'll only be penalizing yourself.

Ultimately, the best approach is to write unique content for your own site or blog, and unique content for submission to article directories.