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.

In my previous blog(!), I had recorded details of Cashback Shoppers ranking position for various keywords. However, as that information has been lost forever ( I’m posting the rankings here for the first time!

Bearing in mind that Cashback Shopper was only launched in November 2007 & the amount of on-site optimisation was limited to just the front page by the original control panel provided by eDealsUK, I’m pretty pleased with how the site progressed. However, following a major rankings update by Google, the site slipped in and out of the results for a few weeks, but seems to have stabilised again now.

First of all, the site jumped straight into the Cashback News top 20 most visited cashback sites with an Alexa (Alexa rankings are only a rough indicator of how popular a site is) ranking of 400,468!! This put it above NHS Cashback (21st) & Cashback To You (26th), which are both run by eDealsUK themselves! As well as this, Cashback Shopper is the highest Alexa ranked white label site registered on Cashback News!!

Over the past couple of years there has been an explosion in the number of cashback sites & Cashback News tracks the major news from the UK’s Cashback sites.

Their top 20 as at 31st March 2008 is:

# Quidco 25,348
# Rpoints 76,403
# GreasyPalm 77,747
# Give or Take 81,311
# Top Cashback 116,208 – ↑1
# MutualPoints 119,432 – ↓1
# eDeals UK 167,891
# Free Fivers 197,208 – ↑2
# Cashback Rewards 205,521
# Linemypocket 246,858 – ↑4
# MoneyBackMadness 249,117 – ↑1
# RupizCompare 265,300 – ↑5
# Cashbin 270,200
# eCashBack 287,635 – ↑19
# Comparison Plus 299,291 – ↑15
# CashbackChief 321,828 – ↑5
# Cashback Junction 333,294 – ↑6
# trollyCASH 375,873 – ↓7
# CashbackCascade 397,672 – ↑9
# Cashback Shopper 400,468 New

As some of the sites in the Top 20 have been established for many years & are all unique cash-back websites rather than white labels, I’m very pleased with my Search Engine Optimisation efforts so far )

Since this chart, the control panel for Cashback Shopper has been updated to Version 2 and allows for much more customisation of other pages. This can only benefit my SEO efforts & I look forward to the next chart which is due at the end of May.

But although this is nice to see, the most important “chart” is the one known as Google (plus Yahoo & MS Live Search!). So a regular rankings check on popular keywords will show how my site is doing in the search engines & what they think its value is for these key phrases.

Google
cash back 38
cash back shopping 14
cash rewards site 9
cashback 36
cash-back 39
cashback from shopping 48
cashback shopper 1
cashbackshopper 1
cashback shopping 15
cashback shopping site 12
cashback site 3
cashback sites 4
cashback uk 12
earn cashback 6
get cashback
online shopping uk 38
online shops 87
shopping cash back 11
shopping cashback 10
uk cash back 6
uk cashback 5
UK cashback shopping 4
UK cashback shopping site 11
UK shopping cashback 6

Yahoo
cash back 42
cash back shopping 1
cash rewards site 83
cashback 77
cash-back 44
cashback from shopping 23
cashback shopper 1
cashbackshopper 1
cashback shopping 13
cashback shopping site 5
cashback site 19
cashback sites 16
cashback uk 27
earn cashback 15
free cashback 6
get cashback 6
internet shopping 81
shopping cash back 11
shopping cashback 2
uk cash back 10
uk cashback 6
UK cashback shopping 7
UK cashback shopping site 4
UK shopping cashback 9