What is an Article Directory
If you place a search term in any search engine for "Article Directory" you will see pages and pages of results. The question is to ask why are there so many?
The answer is that most Article Directories are monetized with advertisements that range from low paying keywords right to the best paying keywords. As you can imagine the owner of such a directory can make a reasonable return for their investment in monitoring and promoting their directory.
Article Directories rely on articles being submitted and approved to increase both the size of the site and the chances of an ever increasing return of income.
An article directory is a large data base of articles submitted by members that cover a vast range of topics. Those articles are then permitted to be reproduced by other website/blog owners as long as they follow copyright principals.
At an article directory you can type your search term topic and the directory database will return to you all relevant articles on that chosen topic.
How do Article Directories help you
When you submit your article to a directory you are asked for a category. Choose the right category and submit your article.
With your article most directories allow one html link highlighting one keyword in the body of your article. This is called anchor text and is written like this, Text to be displayed and the correct method to use.
Check the directory first as some do not allow html links in the body of the article. If not then usually there is an Author Biography area that will allow html links. This is where you place your anchor text and to make sure if someone uses your article have an open url reference such as http://www.mysite.com etc.
Now your articles are linking to your site both using keywords and your actual url. This is link building and a system used to drive traffic to your site. The beauty of this is that the traffic has already been targeted as they have read your article and want more information from you, hence they have clicked on one of your links.
Duplicate Content Issue
When using Article Submission software you will be submitting the article to many article directories. This will create duplicate content. Now duplicate content means that it will not be indexed as only one article on the topic can be listed in a search engine.
Your article should, because of duplicate content, never be reproduced on your own website/blog pages as that is clearly duplicate content.
A rule of thumb is the article with the best and appropriate links will be number one in a search engine. If you have an article on your site and an article directory has more links to your article then your site will be a duplicate and thus penalised.
The way to avoid this is to either re-write the article or write a totally new article that has no duplication in any form of your own website/blog pages.
Article Submission Software
Article submission software consists of several tabs within the program. One tab is about the author, the other tabs are your article/s, the website article directories and the submit tab.
At each tab you complete the information such as name, address and email for confirmation and notification from the article directory. The article tab allows you to edit your article in case you need to take out html comments in the body of the article or add such html comments.
The software tab for article directories contains all of the directories you want to submit to. Select all or select only those directories you want your submission to go to.
Start the submission process. As each article directory is processed you will see the page inside the software, just like your browser. All details can be seen there, such as logging in, opening a new account, select the right category and article submission confirmation.
When done the next article directory is opened and the process continues.
As you can imagine with everything set-up this process takes only a few minutes. Imagine how long it would take to manually perform this task.
Article submission best practice
We have covered What is An Article Directory - How Do Article Directories Help You - Duplicate Content Issues and the software itself.
Best practice to submit articles is choosing the right article directory. No use having your pet article on a search engine optimization article directory as no one will be interested.
Articles should be submitted to directories that are appropriate for your article content. This is where some article directory submission websites sometimes submit your articles to inappropriate directories and might create some problems for your article.
When taking into consideration article directories choose those with a high page rank and a good Alexa traffic rank. You can find these using the Google page rank toolbar and the Alexa ranking toolbar.
Now having your articles on high page rank article directories will add quite some weight to your links directed at your site. Not only that but you will generate a lot of traffic to your site.
It must be stressed that you must make your articles unique, no copying other articles, make them your own content and compile articles you are proud for others to read.
By following these simple steps you will build traffic to your pages from interested targeted readers. Your site will have a sound link building program in place and as such you will see an increase in your sites search engine positioning.
Beside all that, follow best practice, have fun with what your doing and continue to learn sound writing techniques, promotion and success in some form will follow. Article submission software The site explaining more in further details can be found at http://www.psychic-aus.com/map/map.htm