Article Directories Aren't Just for Link Bait

How many articles have you seen extolling the virtues of articles as a way of getting links to your site? Many hundreds, I'm sure. I know that I've written a number of them myself...
Now, it's very true that articles are a great way of getting one-way links to your site from websites with excellent page rank. This is a good way of improving the number of links coming into your site, improving your overall PageRank in Google and of climbing in the search rankings. As a result, this is a great way of improving your site's standing in the search engines as a whole.
But, using articles as part of your overall internet strategy is, and should be, much more than that...

The truth is that a large number of those using articles for link-baiting purposes forget one very important thing about articles... people actually read them! Indeed, most article directories keep running because people come to read the articles and then click on the ads next to them. If people didn't actually read the articles, or want to find out about the information provided in the articles, then the system simply wouldn't work.

This is a key point that so many article publishers completely ignore. If people read your articles and the articles are good then they will follow your links! You're not just publishing articles as link bait for the search engines, you're also motivating people to click on your links within the articles themselves... And that can make a huge difference to your business.

This year, as every year, myself and a group of colleagues who all have websites (we all get over 250 000 visitors per month) got together to chew the fat over the internet business in its broader sense. One of the things we always end-up doing is looking at our statistics and discussing how important the search engines really are to our strategies.

Being fairly well versed in SEO we typically use the 75:25 rule in working on our sites. 25% of our time is spent building new content and 75% of our time is spent working on SEO and link-building. We all use article marketing in its various forms.

When we pooled all our data together it emerged that, on average, 52% of our traffic was coming from the search engines, but 48% of all our traffic was coming from 'other sources'. These sources included blog posts, forum and blog comments and directory listings. But the whopping majority of the traffic (39%) was coming from people directly following links in various articles we'd written and submitted. For comparison, direct search traffic from Google came out at 45% of the total.

As you can see article traffic wasn't lagging far behind Google traffic in terms of our overall traffic sources. Now these statistics are quite amazing...

If you can get almost as many direct referral visitors from your article submissions as you can get from Google searches, why is everyone so focussed on Google rankings? The answer, probably, is because the 'gurus' are telling everyone to be focussed on Google. After all, selling info products on how to climb to the top of Google's organic searches is how they make their money.

But, and here's the kicker, writing and submitting articles gives you a double whammy... Not only are you getting excellent back-links to your site (where you control the anchor text) but you are also submitting authoritative content that will get you known as an expert in your field and will make people follow the article links back to your site. You've just killed two SEO birds with one stone!

Articles can be truly amazing for your site rankings and your traffic. Just remember that real people will be reading them and make certain that you write good articles that people will actually want to read. The better your articles are the more traffic you will get.

About the Author
Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Articles Database where you can freely post your own articles. He also authors the successful Celtnet WebInfo eZine with information on SEO, internet marketing and tips.