Article Directories

The best article directory on the internet, bar none that I’m currently aware of, is EzineArticles.com. Currently, it is the big fish in the pond. Even the Ultimate Article Marketing List puts EZA on top.

However, I know there are a great many other very good article directories out there, and I don’t want to discount those.

I’ve seen people on the internet giving seemingly sound advice of picking one article directory and submitting all your articles to it. If you’re followed this school of thought, then I can see why you’re looking for the best article directory. However, that is a slightly dangerous approach, and I’ll tell you why.

It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket. EzineArticles is a terrific directory, yes, even the best article directory currently out there, but what would happen if something catastrophic happened to EZA and all your articles went poof? Relying on only a single traffic source is ALWAYS, and I repeat, ALWAYS a bad idea.

So, aside from relying on only one article directory, why else should you submit to multiple directories? Well, one answer is to get more backlinks. Every article you submit gets you another backlink to your site, giving you another penny of Google favor.

I’ve heard people talk about duplicate content penalties, but, let’s be honest. Those just don’t apply to offsite content. If Google penalized a site every time duplicate content showed up online, there wouldn’t be an internet! They know site owners cannot exclusively control their offsite content, so they don’t penalize you for it. Think I’m wrong? Go ask the boys at StomperNet. It’s your onsite duplicate content that hurts you.

But this isn’t about SEO, it’s about finding the best article directory out there. And to wrap this up, I’ll say that yes, EZA is the best, but don’t use it exclusively. Find a bunch of other ones that you trust and use them concurrently. That is your best article submission strategy.

There are literally thousands of article websites on the internet. That does not mean that all are equally worth your time and effort to submit content to! So how do you go about evaluating the different article directories? Here are three simple ways – but please note these three factors are not the whole story! They will merely get you pointed in the right direction.

Factor #1. PageRank
Go to the article websites homepage, and check what the pagerank is. I like using a plugin for FireFox called Search Status which shows me PR and Alexa score for every page I visit, right in my toolbar. If the main page has a decent page rank (at least 3) then that tells you that others are linking to the directory, and Google at least knows of its existence. If also gives you a small glimpse of the relative importance of that directory. The higher the PR, the better. However, PR is but one tiny surface of the elephant.

Factor #2. Alexa Score
Alexa score will give you an idea of the amount of traffic that visit these article websites. The lower the score, the better. If Alexa is more than 500,000, it probably isn’t worth your time submitting to that directory, as it just doesn’t have that much traffic. Again though, this is just one small factor.

Factor #3. Source Code
I’m going to get a little bit technical on this one, but it will give you a glimpse into how well these article websites are optimizing their pages for you. Browse to an article on the directory in question, right click, and View Source. That brings up the source code for the page. Near the top somewhere you should find a line that says “meta keywords”. If this line is present, and there are keywords in it relevant to the article, that’s a good thing. It means the article website is properly putting the keywords there. You should also check what they’re putting in there for title and description as well.

These three factors are very simple, basic ones you can check within seconds whenever you’re evaluating article websites, however the real story should take into consideration how well Google can crawl the article website, how many articles they have ranked in the search engines, and many other more complicated factors. The Ultimate Article Marketing List was created by scientifically evaluating 6000 article websites, ultimately boiling that list down to only 98. If you’re looking for the definitive list of the absolute best article websites that you can submit to, you really need to checkout the Ultimate Article Marketing List.

When I started article marketing, I knew I could write articles, but I didn’t know where to submit them to. Then I discovered EzineArticles, which everyone said was the best. But I was always keeping my eye open for an article directories list that I could really trust.

The problem was, every list I found looked great, but there wasn’t any methodology given as to how it was compiled. Basically, it was the just the personal opinion of the list author.

My article submission strategy became something like this: submit to EzineArticles, plus a couple dozen other sites that had decent PR and Alexa. As far as strategy goes, it was pretty poor.

Then I recently came across Jack Duncan’s Ultimate Article Marketing List. It is an article directories list that has been selected scientifically, and took him hundreds of hours to complete.

If you’re looking for the ultimate article directories list, you really need to check this one out. There are 98 article directories in the current edition, ranked according to a score that includes many factors, including page rank, percentage of overall pages indexed in Google, on page SEO factors, article directory traffic, clickability (on page readability factors) and much more.

Jack scoured the internet, coming up with a list of 6000 unique article directories. He then narrowed that huge list down to just 98. The cream of the crop. Directories where you can be sure you have an excellent shot at ranking in Google for your keyword. Directories that you won’t be wasting your time if you submit to them.

If you’re serious about your article marketing, you really need to checkout the Ultimate Article Directories List. Not only will you save wasted time, but you will be enhancing your marketing efforts by only investing in high-value sites. Definitely a “strongly recommend” in my books.