Most of us who use content syndication use article directories most often to distribute our content.  There are three advantages to using a good article directory.  The first of those is that a top ranking article directory gets a lot of visitors.  That means a lot of people have an opportunity to find our article there.  An attractive title will encourage a lot of those visitors to read our articles and, perhaps, click through to our website.

Secondly, many webmasters who monetize their sites with advertising will add our articles (including our links) to add to their own sites in our niche or a related niche.  These sites will typically have far less traffic than the article directories, however that traffic will tend to be highly targeted.  Consequently, we can expect a higher proportion of those niche website’s visitors to choose to read our article.

Visibility of our links to the search engines, thereby improving our position in the search engine listings, is the third advantage of submitting our content to article directories.  However part of that improvement will be limited and temporary, because most of the repeated instances of publication of that same article will be considered duplicate content.  Once the search engine robots have done their job properly, most of those duplicate external links will have disappeared in terms of their SEO value.

We can get some additional benefit by providing each directory with a unique version of our article.  We can accomplish that efficiently using article spinning.  But even if we submit a unique article to each directory, the individual sites that take their content from that directory will still be duplicate content.  So this approach to spinning is a huge improvement over distributing the same article to multiple directories, it leaves room for improvement in maximizing our benefit from our article marketing efforts.

Another alternative is to add to our syndication plan a system by which we can distribute unique, spun versions of our articles directly to individual sites within our niche.  This can be an extremely tedious process as it involves considerable research time in finding those sites, establishing contact with the webmasters and persuading them that it is in their interests to publish our articles with our links on their sites.

Fortunately there is a semi-automated system to make implementation of this writer to publisher exchange simpler.  I think of it as an article distribution cooperative.  I go into the specifics of this content marketing system elsewhere.

One of the main keys to keep in mind is to really tailor the articles you add on your site to your specific niche.If you have a site about baseball cards (selling, collecting) – you dont want information non related to baseball, it just does not really make sense.  Often the addition of a blog to a site about the niche is a great addition, as you can post all the articles you find interesting to this blog.  Its simple to do, and best of all its free.One great benefit of adding lots of niche content is users will bookmark your site and come back often to read more.The big thing is to add content to make your site more interesting – this expands your audience.  Often times you can also add an RSS feed from specific article sites to automatically update your content so it always appears fresh.  This is a viable option if you don’t have the time or resources to update content every few days and/or scour the web for the content.  Simply find a blog or article directory that covers your niche who is posting content that you deem great, then pull in the RSS feed into your site.RSS is great because the source site is the one updating and adding information, the RSS mirrors it on your site.

Whichever method you choose to get the content on the website, usually this will equate to higher search engine rankings as they get smarter about assessing the quality of sites and knock down the ones that don’t meet the benchmarks for quality.This will also start to remove sites that dont have as much content or do not really work on it – their hurt is your gain.  Using an article directory is a must have for those looking to build up the back links to their websites.

Most people who build a website eventually figure out that the only way to make anything, no matter how cool your site is, no matter how great the content is – is that traffic is king. Without anyone seeing the product you are offering for sale, there is no point even trying. Think of it this way, lets say you invented the next great widget – you know it will really sell and everyone you have shown it to agrees that it’s the best. If you spend a ton of dough and advertise in the middle of nowhere, it does not matter because no one sees it. If you choose to advertise in a city where its very busy, everyone sees it. the biggest and most important difference is traffic. Article directories are like a gateway to the city from the desert.

Submitting your original content to an article directory is very easy, but first you need to do the keyword research. While this may seem slow and boring (or even a pain), it really has to be done to get decent results from your work. The link back to your site uses the keywords, and they are also used in context within the article. The keywords that are used to link to your site are gathered and analyzed by the search engines as one part of the determining formula for ranking. The reason you need to do research is there is a fine balance between useless (as in never used search terms), and super competitive ones where it will be too hard initially to try to get ranking for. So when you submit your articles to an article directory, you want the keywords to have decent search volume, but not massive so you can get the most bang for your time.

Article directories will then take your content and display it in their directory of thousands of other articles. Users looking for great content for their site will come to article directories to grab it. Additionally, people subscribe to the RSS feeds from article directories that have them to get fresh content via RSS when it is published. Sometimes an article directory is also considered an authority by Google and others, thereby getting a link coming from that site garners more weight than from other links that do not have this authority.