Organic SEO via Article Submission

Posted by Miles Evans

Alright I promised I would come back to this in my original review of Article Post Robot, where I coverd article submission for gaining some organic seo love. Article submission was something I had tried in the past but I had always done so by hand submitting to 2 or 3 of the larger portals. In my test during February I was pleasantly surprised how easily I nailed #1 positions across Google, Yahoo, and MSN for some well searched terms. And in 7 days no less. On Big Daddy servers I was noticing #1 spots within 48 hours of posting. In this article I aim to explain, step by step, exactly how I pulled this off, and why it works.

About a week ago I noticed I was #1 in Google for most of the stories I had been submitting to submission sites. Yahoo seems to not like me so much but I am always on the main page at least. Another massive benefit in Google that you will see down the road due to link age considerations, is a large amount of backlinks to your website from pages with a decent PR. With one submission I even nailed two PR7 and one PR8 link. Also I found my article republished, links intact, on several same themed blogs and sites. All of this this as we know, is yummy in Google’s tummy.

Obviously this can change but take a look for yourself:

VideoLan Tutorial on Google #1
VideoLan Tutorial on MSN #1
VideoLan Tutorial on Yahoo #1

Keep in mind this article was only published on February 20th – and these rankings were achieved in about 7 days. In fact if you search for any of the article titles in my side bar you will find most of them in the top 10 across all search engines – and quite a few are #1. Now you are not going to hit number #1 positions for very competitive keywords right away, but with a little work you can usually find some pay dirt. The trick is finding keywords that are an attainable goal and that still pull in searchers.

Now before any SEM people jump on me for helping to create an army of article site submission spammers, let me explain a bit. This will NOT work for you if you provide crappy, spammy, or just pain lame and useless content. I spend anywhere from 3-8 hours writing a quality article I intend to submit. If you have nothing new, fresh or insightful to write about, put your pen down until you do.

Also keep in mind you are not going to get a flood of traffic by doing this once or even 10 times. I only bother to submit articles that are worthy but article submission is now a time consuming part of my regular writing duties. The idea is to attain a trickle of traffic from many sources and get some chatter going. The next step is teaching your girlfriend how to submit articles for you...Heh, ok seriously...

So here is exactly how I did it:

• I wrote a solid 500-800 word paper on an emerging or current technology.
• I mention my keywords 2-3 times in my article in a natural non spammy way. 1 time in the first paragraph.
• I used my keywords in my title.
• I followed basic SEO principles for page layout: meta, file name, H1 tags etc.
• I triple checked my spelling and never used foul language.
• I use title and alt tags for accessibility reasons (Google positively weights this).
• I generously provide links to sites of interest woven within my article. (this too!)
• I submitted my article to Digg (see: Movable Type Digg Link)
• I submitted to the top 25 article submission sites with Article Post Robot.

Your tools or techniques may vary but article submission remains powerful SEO kung fu when used ethically and regularly. Article Post Robot and similar apps are still in essence manual submission tools (at least for me) so Google and friends have no reason to punish people who regularly submit articles to these sites. Publishers want content and writers need publishers. It’s win , win, and I don’t think it will be going away any time soon.

I paired my list down to about 25 article sites. My reasoning is that spammy, cheap looking submission sites that accept any old article, may one day be considered a bad neighborhood. Nobody wants links from the ghetto now do they? I will share the names of the sites I submit to in a future article.

I also should mention that duplicate content has never been an issue for me when submitting articles, but this is always a potential risk, but more of a long term after thought. Be sure to publish your original article on your website FIRST and always make it clear in your article where the piece originated – like in the bio portion of your submission for example. If you use copyscape keep an eye on things that way.

For now, the above method works extremely well and is quite simple to pull off when using a solid submission tool. The reward for me was a sustainable 500% increase in traffic for some competitive terms. Likely the fact you even found this article is more testimony that this stuff actually works.

UPDATE: Dave over at Article Post Robot saw this article and suggested I offer my readers a 15% rebate. Sweet! Dave says this offer will only be valid for a short time so act now before you forget! Click this link to claim your discount: http://www.articlepostrobot.com/profitpapers. This special offer will be closed soon. For real

If you dig this article or it helped you give me a digg! It's like an electronic reach-around.

Posted Mar 06, 2006 at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!