It’s no secret that article directories took a sizable hit a few months back in the Google Farmer Update. Article directories don’t have the same impact which they used to in the search engines, but a lot of people have turned their back on them completely when it comes to article marketing.
Article marketing is still a powerful marketing tool and a completely free one at that. I’m going to offer 3 reasons to continue article marketing today on article directories despite the changes.
Article Marketing
Syndication – Syndication is the number one reason to continue article marketing on directories. Most article directories offer full syndication rights to any articles/content which you post on their directories. This means that anyone who goes to that article directory can find and take your content and put it right on their websites.
It’s required that they leave your resource box intact so that your links back to your main website are kept intact, as well, and anyone who reads your content on whoever syndicates your article’s website has a chance of visiting your website if they like what they read. Make the most of your resource box with a strong call to action to really steal whoever syndicates your article’s traffic.
Backlinks – Truthfully, the link juice you get from article directories took a hit from the update, as well. Still, SOLELY using article directory links pointing to domains of mine I’ve achieved rises in my page ranks within the span of just several months. Additionally, getting your article syndicated on a high profile authority website can make that backlink worth potentially much much more.
Traffic – Let’s not forget about the traffic, either. You can use article directories for traffic in a number of ways. First, you get people searching the actual article directory. When you first submit a new article, you’ll get a lot of initial views. If the article is displayed on the main page of that article directory and you’ve got an enticing title, you’ll get tons of reads. If that article begins to rank well on its own in the search engines, you can get organic views that way, as well, though the odds of this happening are worse than they used to be admittedly.
And finally, don’t forget again about the syndicated traffic you can enjoy. If your article is syndicated on highly populated websites, you stand to inherit a lot of traffic with your article, so ultimately it’s always in your best interest to write high quality content worthy of being syndicated to enjoy the full benefits.
One last thing I’d like to note is that while article directories were affected by the farmer update, the best ones like Ezine Articles are learning to adapt and are making moves to improve their overall quality in the eyes of Google and other major search engines. This ultimately benefits you, as well, because while they put in systems to filter out the amount of low quality content which they publish on their sites, they’ll eventually regain some clout in the search engines.