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Why You Should Use Article Directories to Promote Your Website

If you are online and are not already using article directories to promote your website, you are missing out on a free and highly effective marketing option. Article directories are great ways to draw traffic to your site without paying for advertising. However, to get real traffic to your site using an article directory, you must know how to use them correctly.

What Article Directories Are

Before you can use an article directory, you have to know what one is. Article directories are websites where thousands upon thousands of articles on just about any subject are posted. They are generally categorized to make it easier for readers to find information they want. They are also linked together, so a reader reading about “Hawaii travel” will naturally go from article to article on that topic. People can use the articles they find in the directories on their own websites, either for free or for a small fee. Authors pay nothing to submit to article directories.

How Article Directories Benefit Online Businesses

You are probably thinking, “Sure, that’s great. But how does an article directory help me promote my business? Doesn’t giving away free content defeat my purpose as an online business?”

These are great questions. When you submit an article to an article directory, it will contain a bio with a link to your website. Since you are the author of the article, you are allowed to include this information.

This means that anyone who is searching online and comes across the article directory will see a link to your site. Not only that, but the people who use the content on their own websites are required to keep it exactly as it appears in the directory. This means that your link could show up on hundreds of websites.

Article directories are generally large websites. This means that the web spiders are attracted to them. Having your link on these articles is a crucial part of an online linking campaign.

How to Make Your Submissions Effective

If you are going to submit to article directories, you need to do two things. First, you need to learn about proper keyword usage. You need the right percentage of keywords in your article, and they need to appear naturally within the content. This will draw the search engine spiders to the article, thus exposing people to your link at the bottom.

You also need to make your content unique and helpful. If your article is the same as thousands that are already online, other website owners will not want to use it. Also, if the information is not helpful, people will not read the entire article. Your goal is to have them read the entire article so that they will click at the link on the bottom.

Having helpful information in the article also helps the reader view you as an “expert” in the field. This is important, because you want them to have a reason to click on the link. If they are reading useless information, they will have no desire to visit your site. Also, proving that you are knowledgeable about a particular topic will show that whatever product or service you are marketing is worth buying.

What to Do if You Can’t Write

At this point you are probably wondering what you can do because you can’t write. You are an entrepreneur and business owner, not a writer. The good news is that you have options.

You can hire a freelance writer to “ghostwrite” the article for you. Ghostwriting means writing the article in your name. Instead of placing his or her name on the article, the freelancer uses your name and your business link. You will need to pay for this service, but the amount you will pay for a quality article is far less than the amount you would pay for an advertising campaign, and a well-written article placed in the right article directories will draw more traffic to your site than just about any other form of advertising.

Where can you find ghostwriters? There are a variety of online classifieds where you can post your job requirements or search for available writers. You can ask for quotes to help you learn what the going rate for a writer is. Keep in mind that you will pay more if you have detailed information that needs to be researched or if you are working on a tight deadline. You can also hire a content creation company to help you if you require numerous articles that would be too much for one individual writer.

If you do use a ghostwriter, be sure that you proofread the article before submitting it. You may find that the writer did not approach a particular topic as you would have wanted. You can ask the writer to rewrite the material, but posting something that is inaccurate or does not sound well written will detract from your goal of drawing traffic to your site.

Risks of Using an Article Directory

There is only one main risk to using an article directory, and that is that someone will download your content and use it on their site without including the link. You can do some work on your own to check for this, but it is hard to police. However, the occasional unscrupulous website owner who uses your content incorrectly is a risk worth taking for the many users who will give you a link on their site.

Post Much and Often

Once you get the hang of using an article directory, post many articles, and post them often. The more fresh, relevant content that links to your page, the more traffic you will receive. Be sure to continually research your keywords, because the keywords that people search for constantly change.

Also, submit your articles to a variety of sites. The most popular article directories may not draw certain demographic of people. The more places that have your article and your link, the better your traffic results will be. Since these sites are free to use, you might as well submit to as many as you can.

One such article directory is ArticleHub.US. On this site anyone can submit content and links. Be sure to check out their current articles and learn more about how to submit your content to their site. It’s free and easy and will draw the traffic you need to your main site.

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Well, as luck would have it, I received a phone call last night from my friend telling me that his website was bombing again. I Googled his favorite keywords and they seemed to rank fine over at my end, but he explained that he traffic stats from Google was flat. They nosedived a day or two ago. I chalked up the results I was getting to Google adjusting the results.

This new twist got me thinking. What in the world could be making this website’s ranking bounce around like this? Looking back, the proxy website may not have been 100% at fault. There has to be something else.

I began doing a little research and learned about few things about duplicate content. The reason I looked at that particular area is because there is absolutely nothing else I can find wrong with this website. Duplicate content seems to be a rather popular culprit.

I came across a pretty well laid out website called “Google Rankings Diagnostics” that describes a whole heck of a lot of issues you might be having with your website. This website validated what I pretty much already knew…that if you have multiple URLs (on a domain) with the same exact content, Google has trouble figuring out which page is the original and may throw all of them out.

I took a very close look at my friend’s website. Again, I took a unique line of text from his homepage and searched for it in Google (inside quotes). A funny thing happened. I saw the homepage result, but there were a few extra results as well, all on his domain. There were about 5 extra pages in total.

Now, some of these extra results have been there for years, so I don’t attribute the issue to those pages being duplicate content. What struck me was one of the extra pages.

A few months ago, my friend moved one of his pages. He put a 301 redirect in his .htaccess file, which was the correct thing to do. So now, the old directory where the page was held forwarded to a new page. It looked something like this:

Redirect 301 /olddirectory/ http://www.hiswebsite.com/newpage.php

The redirect worked fine, but here is what that extra page in the search results looked like:

http://www.hiswebsite.com/newpage.phpoldpage.php

Guess what page was showing at that URL…yup, the homepage. The dynamic nature of his website sends unknown page results like this to the homepage. This was a fluke. My friend forgot that there were pages inside the old directory he redirected to the new page. Every old page in that old directory was tacked on to the new page, like you see above. To make matters worse, there were a bunch of links from other websites pointing to the old pages in the old directory.

I am not sure if this would cause the ranking drops that he is experiencing, but the timing certainly lines up with when the issue began. It is also certainly considered duplicate content.

So, here is what I did to deal with the issue this time. I deleted the redirects in the .htaccess file and blocked the URLs of all those extra results in the robots.txt file. Hopefully, this will tell Google to not spider or index those pages and it will also tell Google that those links into the site are dead.

Now, we have to wait. I am not going to submit another reinclusion request to Google because I want to see if the ranking returns naturally. If it does, this was the problem for sure.

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This morning, I checked the ranking of the website in question. To my surprise, the site had again ranked number 4 in the Google Search Engine Results. This was most definitely good news. In fact, all key phrases now ranked on page one of the Google SERPs.

I can only hope this persists. So, what did we do? Here is a short list:

- Noticed the website had dropped in Google ranking.
- Took a unique phrase from the website homepage and searched Google using quotes, “like this.”
- Found a direct copy of the website and discovered it had been “Proxy Hijacked.”
- Found IP address of website that Proxy Hijacked our website and blocked it using the .htaccess file.
- Submitted a “Reconsideration Request” to Google.

After about a week and a half, our website had regained its ranking in Google.

I read a long article about Proxy Hijacking and it mentioned that Google had fixed the problem. If this was the case with my friend’s website, this certainly isn’t true. While I can not be totally sure Proxy Hijacking caused this case of Google ranking loss, the facts seem to lead down this path.

What is my advice to you? Check either Google or Copyscape once a month to see if someone has taken text or Proxy Hijacked your website.

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What to do? That’s easy too. Just open up your .htaccess again and type in the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]

You can do this with other pages that have the same problem as well.

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Still you ask, “Why in the world do I care about that?” Ok, I’ll keep going. The main reason I look at the HTTP headers is to find out what the HTTP status code is. The reason the status code is important to me is because this is the code the search engines use for a multitude of things.

Let me give you a little example, and this related to my previous post regarding the sudden drop in Google rankings. As I was doing research into what the problem may be for this particular website, I came across an issue where someone had recently put custom “404 Not Found” error pages up on some of their websites. Everyone knows that custom “404 Not Found” error pages are cool, but what some people don’t know is that if those 404 error pages show a “200 OK” (successful HTTP requests) code, the site may be in big trouble, SEO-wise. The reason for this is because there are going to be many “404 Not Found” error pages on a dynamic website. If you have your custom “404 Not Found” error page showing a “200 OK” response code, the search engines will think that all the instances of this page are duplicate. You know as well as I do, that spells trouble.

What’s worse is if you set your homepage as your “404 Not Found” page. Your homepage is going to return a response code of “200 OK.” That’s not good, because now you have multiple instances of your homepage…all duplicate content.

It’s my opinion that the search engines are smart enough to figure this out. The page (such as your homepage) with the highest Pagerank will prevail. Still, I have some websites that I am working on that have multiple instances of the homepage and they all have Pagerank, which isn’t good, because the duplicates are taking the Pagerank from the real page. Now, again, that’s my opinion.

Here are two tips:

- How to check your HTTP headers - visit this website or just Google “Website header check”

- How to set a particular page as your “404 Not Found” error page in your .htaccess file - Just place this code in the file: “ErrorDocument 404 /404.php” without the quotes. The 404.php file is the actual error page in this case.

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From what I have been reading, it seems as though my conclusion may be correct. At least I am hoping it is. If I ever conclude anything semi-concrete while thinking about Google, it’s a good day for me.

Ok, I found this very helpful and thorough website that pretty much described the exact problem my friend is having. It’s titled “Google Proxy Hijacking” and tells the whole story.

Here is what struck me as I think about this some more.

- My friend’s website has been live since 2004.
- The site seemed to be in the Google sandbox for the entire 4 years.
- For his most competitive keywords, he was ranking past page 20 on Google.
- About two months ago, he made some changes to the homepage copy as well as an HTML overhaul.
- About a month after that, the site ranked number 3 for his most competitive keywords.
- The site ranked on page 1 of Google for about a month.
- The site now sits at page 25 for its most competitive keywords.

Here is my theory. I think the website has been proxy hijacked for a number of years. This is what caused the poor rankings for such a long time. When the homepage text and HTML changes were made about 2 months ago, Google visited the site and found it unique. Google ranked the site well, due to this new unique content. During the month, Google noticed the proxy website was now a duplicate of my friend’s website once again and dropped the website’s ranking.

Does that make sense? From what I read on the website I linked to, it does.

Here are the similarities with what we are experiencing and what the author wrote on the other website:

- My friend’s website has never been banned.
- We did a quoted Google search for supposedly unique content on my friend’s website and a proxy website showed in the search results.
- The proxy URL looked like this: proxysite.com/cgi-bin/pxy/nph-pxy.pl/000010A/http/www.friendssite.com/
- The proxy site was an exact duplicate of my friend’s website.

Now, I am not sure if this is what caused my friends ranking to drop, but all the factors are there. The keywords we are talking about are very competitive, but the fact that his site showed so well in the search results for a month shows me that the potential is there.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

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Now, let me just tell you that duplicate content is everywhere. Actually, someone has probably written this sentence a million times. What we were searching for today was blatant and far reaching content theft. We found a few instances of one of our homepages and general website idea taken for someone else’s use as well as many instances of interior pages taken. Needless to say, we made screen copies of these cases and sent them to our attorney’s office. These are serious and can’t be ignored.

I would like to talk about two things you can do to help out a more subtle form of duplicate content, on your own website.

The first form of duplicate content on your own website is in the form of www vs. non-www. If you go to your website and type in “www.mysite.com” and then type in “mysite.com,” you may see the same page appear. In the search engine’s eyes, these are two copies of the same page. How do you fix this? It’s easy. Just open up your .htaccess file and type in the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mysite\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

When someone types in “mysite.com” to visit your website, they will automatically be forwarded to “www.mysite.com.” The search engines will be forwarded as well.

Another form of duplicate content on your own website comes in the form of “www.mysite.com/” vs. “www.mysite.com/index.html.” The search engines see this same page as two different ones. What to do? That’s easy too. Just open up your .htaccess again and type in the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]

When someone either types in “www.mysite.com/index.html” or follows a link like that to your website, they will be automatically be forwarded to “www.mysite.com.”

Now, here is the disclaimer. I used this on my server setup and it worked. Please check with your own hosting company to see if something similar will work for your too.

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