Article Content King

Article Directories or Google — Which Brings The Most Traffic?

October 20, 2009 by Dan Blackburn

Most article marketers begin writing an article with a keyword phrase or set of keyword phrases in mind. Their motivation for writing the article is getting their site ranked for that keyword phrase on Google and other search Engines like Yahoo & MSN.

They will try to use the particular keyword phrase or phrases as often as they can in the article body, or perhaps they will go to great lengths to make sure that the keyword density in the article is exactly 4.9% or 3.7% or 6.8% or what ever percentage keyword density they read was the best to use when optimising articles for the search engines.

They will use bolding, italics, even BLOCK CAPS when they use the keyword phrase in the article in the belief that doing this will help their site (not the article) rank better for the keyword phrases that they want to rank for.

This is the WRONG approach to article marketing!

The problem is, that people with this mentality often care little for the quality of the articles that they submit. It’s stupid! Yes, stupid. The value of a well written article is worth infinitely more than a link in a junk article approved on an unmoderated article directory!

Article directories are not fantastic places to get SEO back links from anymore, they were back in 2007 but the Internet changes.

What they are fantastic places from which you can “spawn” back links, and great places to get highly targeted traffic and followers / subscribers. The links you get on article directories are fantastic, but it’s not because they are the foundation of your #1 rankings on Google, it’s because interested people are finding and reading your articles, then clicking through to your site or perhaps because someone is frequently using your articles in their newsletter and broadcasting them to their 10,000+ subscribers or twitter followers.

Even if you are getting #1 ranking for your web site solely because of your article marketing efforts, I’d bet my house that you are getting more traffic from well ranked pages that you displaying your articles on other web sites (like article directories, and the blogs and newsletters who have published your article from an article directory).

Google may be your top traffic provider, but when you add up all the traffic you are getting from other places publishing your article, I bet it’s a lot more.

If not, then you are definitely doing article marketing wrong. What? You think you can generate more traffic from Google to your 52 page web site than all the tens of thousands of web site pages that contain links to your site combined?

When you search Google, how often do you find links to articles on article directories or blogs? That is some of the best traffic you can get! Targeted by Google and framed by your article before they visit your site, ready to buy.

Above all, the quality of your article is paramount. If it is junk, even if the you are achieving the top rankings you desire (doubtful), you are sure to be missing out on a lot of traffic, no publisher worth their salt is ever going to publish a junk article.

Sure, your articles may get published on some of the lower quality the article directories, but it will never be picked up… and frankly, if an article directory does not moderate their content well enough, then the links you get from those sites are unlikely to have any affect at all on your traffic or rankings. Links from junk sites could even hurt you.

With this in mind, the first thing you should think about before writing an article is not which keyword phrase you want to rank for, but how you can write something that people will want to read and publishers will want to publish. Only then will you unlock the real power of article marketing.

Don’t disregard keyword optimisation completely, just make sure your focus is more on providing quality information and portraying yourself as an expert.

If you do that, people will want to follow you, they will trust you and they will buy from you… if they want what you are offering.

At article content king moderate every article submitted to make sure it is worthy of publishing on other sites, before we publish it ourselves. Then we automatically promote each article to an opt-in targeted audience. If your articles are consistantly good enough, frequent enough and as you get ranked on the top author pages, your articles will get published and promoted by others more frequently.  More so as people begin to recognise article content king as a great place to find articles.