Article Directories are a form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) where companies and professional writers submit articles based on a specific niche. Article directories are also sometimes called Ezines, or Online Magazines, for their depository methods - sometimes hosting hundreds or thousands of documents related to a given subject.

What is the benefit of submitting to an article directory? When search engines scan the Internet for content, it “spiders” the web pages and harvests links from each page. The crawler then searches other pages for links and indexes pages that link back and forth with each other.

Article directories use this technology by allowing website owners the ability to link back to their own site using keyword articles, which trigger search engines to rank pages higher. Article standards developed by SEO experts typically call for a word count of 400-500+ words and a keyword density of approximately 2%or 3%.

They also demand that an article be different enough from any other piece of existing web copy that it is viewed as being “unique” by the search engines. But although common SEO methods specify that duplicate content penalizes a website ranking, Google has denied it. Regardless, article directories often require unique content themselves, and More >