I wrote previously about using article submissions to increase the number of backlinks & traffic to your website.

I’ve been submitting my articles manually, to the top 10 article directories, but this process is very drawn out & complicated by the slightly different layouts & entry requirements of each directory. With thousands of directories out there, although submitting to the top 10, 20 or 30 will achieve results, it will be impossible to do many more manual submissions, which will mean you have to write significantly more articles to get more links.

I’ve been looking at the different article submission websites & software for some time & decided now was the time to take the plunge!

I’ve used Submit2Please’s Article Submission Service in the past, but the charges could be considerable if you have a number of articles to publish:

• $49.95 for 100 PR 3 and above Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories & 65 PR 3 Directories)
• $74.95 for 200 PR 2 and above Directories(35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories & 100+ PR 2 Directories)
• $99.95 for 300 Various PR Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories, 100+ PR 2 Directories & 100+ PR 1 & 0 Directories)
• $124.95 for 400 Various PR Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories, 100+ PR 2 Directories & 200+ PR 1 & 0 Directories)

Bearing in mind I currently have 7 articles to submit, this is a bit too much to pay!

So, I started to look around for services or software that promise to submit to a large number of sites at a reasonable cost, whilst making sure that the submissions are valid & not classed as spam by either the directories, or Google.

Apart from the dodgy looking article submission software packages for $37, there seems to be a consensus of opinion around the following:

• iSnare
• Article Marketing Automation
• Article Marketer
• Ultimate Article Wizard
• The Phantom Writers
  

I was drawn to Article Marketers & Ultimate Article Wizard out of these, mainly because The Phantom Writers is another pay per article plan, iSnare seems a bit too cheap (my opinion on cheap services has been clouded by my recent experiences with 1and1 & Tiscali!) & other users have suggested that AMA only gets your articles out to about 30 sites.

I was originally put off UAW as it costs $67 per month & it seems that you have to spend time using it to rewrite your articles using what is known as “spinning”. Content (article) spinning involves taking an original article and using it to generate 10′s or 100′s of new unique versions of the text & these “spun” versions of your article are submitted instead. Each of these new articles presents the same ideas and concepts as the original, but expressed in different ways. Whilst all are readable and grammatically correct, each is different from the others in terms of the words on the page and therefore unique in Google’s eyes.

The importance of “spinning” your articles will depend on whether you believe that the backlinks from duplicate articles are being disregarded by Google, when Google’s duplicate content filter is treating the article submissions as duplicate content! If this is the case, then it seems pointless to submit your articles to any more than one site for link purposes, but of course, there is the side issue 0f site traffic that your article could generate. There seems to be some debate as to whether this is the case or not, with some people saying it does & others saying it doesn’t! Here’s the part of Google’s duplicate content policy that seems to say it does!

If you believe that each time you submit your article you need to use a different title, different summary, different resource box, and different article body, then perhaps the extra cost of UAW is worth it. However, I’ve also found a free spinner system called Jetspinner that I’m signing up to, which will hopefully allow me to carry out this process for nothing. Then I can create dozens of versions of my articles & submit them to all the directories instead!

Jetspinner also advertises its own article submission service called Jet Submitter (which also costs $67 per month), but as I’ve already signed up with Article Marketer for 3 months use (cost $79.95), I’m going to have to use it for now. If I’m not happy with it, I may switch to Jet Submitter & use their combined tools, but I’ll use this time to submit as many articles as possible, on all of the topics covered by my affiliate websites & see if it makes any difference to their links & rankings!

I’ve started working on writing more articles & getting them submitted to various directories. This is a time consuming process, but appears to be one of the few effective methods of getting decent, quality links pointing to my sites.

Although this whole writing process doesn’t come naturally to me, it’s surprising how quickly I’m now reaching my 500+ word target each time. But 500+ words in themselves are not enough; ensuring that the article contains combinations of the keywords & keyphrases you want to target is vital, as this content then shows that your site is relevant to those searched for keyphrases.

But are article submissions worth the time & effort? Once registered with an article directory, manual submissions take around 10 to 15 minutes on average to login, format and submit properly. Obviously, the writing of the article is a separate issue & can take a couple of hours to research and write. However, once the article is written, it can be re-submitted to a number of directories, withi only minor adjustments.

The more directories you submit your articles to, the more exposure they will receive & more links will be detected by the search engines, but you will need to make at least 10 submissions to get a reasonable exposure for your articles, adding up to a couple of hours per article!

To make the most of my time I have to make sure that the article directories I am submitting to, are able to bring me as many visitors and backlinks as possible. I am going to try to do at least 10 manual submissions for each article, so it’s important to choose those directories wisely. The only two ratings easily available to web users to judge the quality of websites and web pages are its Alexa Rating and Google PageRank. Both are not conclusive and often do not reflect the true authority or traffic of a page. But since there is nothing better, I will stick to these two figures when deciding if a directory is worth submitting to. Of course, one must not forget the power of themed sites. If you have a choice between a general directory and a directory focusing on the article topic; it’s better to choose the latter.

The current Top 10 article directories (by Alexa Ranking and with a Page Rank of around 5/6) are shown below & these are my starting point for any article submissions:

1. ezinearticles.com
2. ArticlesBase.com
3. buzzle.com
4. helium.com
5. webpronews.com
6. goarticles.com
7. searchwarp.com
8. articledashboard.com
9. articlealley.com
10. articlesnatch.com

However, there are some restrictions placed on articles by these directories; for example, buzzle.com insists that their articles are unique & not reproduced on any other directory, so you will have to write a different article just for this site. Some, such as ArticlesBase.com may apply “nofollow” to the article links, so you won’t benefit from an inbound link.

EzineArticles.com and Buzzle.com can bring you a lot of traffic, GoArticles.com brings you backlinks, and ArticlesFactory.com PageRank. You can even earn money from your articles by publishing them on Helium!

If you don’t have the time, or are not able to write articles by yourself, there are many content providers and ghost writers who can provide articles & then other services that submit them to the directories for you. I have used some of these services myself in the past, but I think the old adage of “you get what you pay for” applies, as I have not been impressed with the cheaper offerings I have seen so far!

I am considering using some more expensive services in the near future, but the cost does vary wildly; from $5 per article (for very poor offerings), to the most recent quote I had of £100 per article!! I think something inbetween will be more in my league & will blog about any that I find particularly useful/value for money.

It’s nearly been a month since I blogged on here, mainly due to the amount of web design work I am doing.

One project is for a home security company, www.guardedhomes.co.uk, offering ipCCTV, gates, railings, shutters, safe rooms & the like, another new(ish) recruitment firm, as well as 3 home page mock-ups for another well-established recruitment company, not to mention a local escort agency!!!! On top of that, I’ve had a few other enquiries & just never seem to have the time for blogging at the moment. When I actually get paid for some of this work will be interesting though O

I’ve not been able to do much work on Cashback Shopper, or My Travel Extras recently & absolutely NONE on Love Your Pets or UK Shopping Spree & really want to redesign My Travel Extras to be less cluttered & more Web 2.0, but will have to wait for a quiet spell I guess. Once I get paid, I want to promote my dating sites a bit more I recently bought a number of new domains, but guess they will also have to go on the back burner for now: cheapcarhirealicante.com, webtraveloffers.com, travelcheapinfo.com, cheapsmallbusinessbroadband.co.uk, scifigoodies.co.uk, findmegaydates.co.uk, findmelesbiandates.co.uk, plus I wanted to try to resurrect easylolly.com for some sort of financial site.

On top of this Ei42 have just launched in the US, so I’ve been link building for www.cashbackshoppers.biz, in the hope that I can get some more interest in this, but think this is going to need some articles and forum postings to get anywhere…..I did start writing to schools asking them to consider joining as a way to raise funds for their school, but haven’t had the time to carry on.

Maybe I have my fingers in too many pies & am spreading myself a bit too thin, but we’ll see.

I blogged previously about articles & how important they were becoming in the fight to improve natural search engine rankings http://www.freshwebz.co.uk/blog/?p=25.

I decided to use a local, UK based company I found, Maa Designs, that have a very professional looking website & offered to write 400 word articles at a cost of £5 each. I paid half the cost up front for the articles & waited to see what turned up.

Oh dear!

Their website claims to produce “High quality, readable and unique web content” & “professionally written, keyword-rich, up-to-date website content that draw visitor attention“. However, the articles appear to have been written by someone whose grasp of the English language & grammar is not great!!! /

The content provided does not flow and there are spelling mistakes & grammatical errors despite their claim “We submit the articles to your website only after checking for grammatical errors, clarity, spelling mistakes and consistency“. I guess this is just another example of you get what you pay for!

The article supplied for Cashback Shopper is reproduced below as an example of the work offered! I think I will be withholding the other half of their payment!

Maine text:

Add new definition to your shopping habits with CashbackShopper.co.uk. This time as you make your budget try shopping with us. Later on as you make a comparison with your earlier expenditure you will find lots of difference. You will realise how you have got many offers and cheaper rates on the same stuff that you always buy.

Curtail your budget with CashbackShopper.co.uk. We offer you with all possible options for Cashback Shopping and you can save lots of money with us. You are welcomed to join us all for free. Added to this, as you join us, you get £5 Welcome Bonus and another £5 for each friend you refer to our website. With this offer in hand you can shop with over 1000 leading UK Online shops. We make you shop at all the online shops and high street retailers. The list includes Currys, Tesco, Boots, Littlewoods, Prudential and many more of same cadre.

With is it is very obvious to get discounts and cashback from 1200+ Shops. This automatically saves lots of money. As you shop wit us, you get everything you want just at a click difference. You can be a part of all easy and comfortable shopping just in 3 Steps to CashbackShopper. As you join CashbackShopper all free, instantly you get £5 free cash just for signing up. Then through the links that we have got you can shop to all your favourite places. As you finish shopping we pay your cashback through paypal or BACS from our huge range of stores, all free of cost.

As you shop online with us, you are free of all the hassles of visiting the high street. It has been discovered that internet shopping sales have reached £4.5bn as compared with £2.6bn last year. With all these setting trends over online shopping it is better to earn moneyback on all the purchases that you make. And this is possible only with CashbackShopper.co.uk. Added to this we give you the chance of earning more money back on a wide variety of products & services you buy throughout the year.

We privilege you with new discount codes; extra cash back offers & special announcements every day. For all these you just need to give a regular look at the Cashback Shopper blog. The difference that you will get with us is of the special offers & discount codes that make your purchase even cheaper. Added to this, at CashbackShopper.co.uk you get the latest offers, exclusive deals, and fabulous Discount voucher codes as well as cash back, something that you can never deny to have.

You will be surprised to know that at CashbackShopper. there is absolutely NO catch! As online retailers pay regular commission to websites for introducing customers; unlike other websites, we share this commission with you, instead of keeping it for ourselves.

It appears that simple inbound links are no longer good enough to improve your search engine ranking by themselves. As web masters buy up thousands of paid directory links, the value of those links diminish, simply because the links are on websites that are largely irrelevant to the content of your site.

More emphasis is now being placed on articles which should contain information about your websites topic. The content contains links to your site & the idea behind this is that the links show the search engines that your site is relevant to the links pointing to it.

I have already written an article myself for ezinearticles.com, but it can be a time consuming effort (when you’re blogging as well!!), so I decided to look at some Article Writing Services.

I found a UK company that claims to have been researching and writing content for various websites in the US and United Kingdom for more than three years, writing web content for travel and tourism web sites, research websites dealing with history, place information, hotels, hospitals and other articles too.

The effective team of the company consists of 35 well trained Writers, 4 Supervisors and 6 highly qualified editors, and 3 System Administrators & they claim to carry out the following steps when writing articles:

» Conducting research on the key words
» Keyword optimised fresh 400 words per article.
» Writing optimised meta title
» Writing optimised meta descriptions
» Writing meta Keywords
» Unlimited changes on each article

The cost for their service is £5 per article & so I’ve signed up to have 10 articles written for My Travel Extras & Cashback Shopper. Once I get the articles, I will be able to give more information as to their quality & the company details.