Fountain Pen on Parchment Zen and the Art of Pen on Paper

You hear it all the time – one of the best ways to build your web site’s content, get more links, and increase its PageRank is to write and distribute good articles. In addition, getting your name out there as an author of substantive, quality writing is a sure way of establishing yourself as an expert in your profession, another way to bring traffic to your site as visitors flock to hear the great guru first hand. But after distributing a number of articles, many of them to some of the better-known free article directories I have discovered that this might not be the best distribution method, despite claims to the contrary. Here’s why:

First, although these directories contain many, good quality articles, they are also populated with some really lousy stuff. I recently told a fellow writer friend who was concerned about having her stuff side-by-side trash that in many cases people don’t know good writing from bad. And second, most people using these directories search for a specific topic and don’t even see the reams of good and bad stuff.

Second, it appears that many sites that pick up free articles do not have the highest PageRank around, and therefore, will not be viewed as highly valuable links. In fact, sites with low PageRank linking to your site can be a detriment. Could it be that sites that rely upon free content are not as quality-oriented as those that generate original content?

Now that we have debunked the concept of sending your articles to article directories to get more exposure and build links, what is a viable plan for article distribution? You’re not going to like this answer, but like so much in SEO, we believe the best approach is to go out there and find reputable, quality sites and ezines and use much the same approach as you would to acquire good links. Find out who the webmaster, editor, etc. is, and send him or her a personalized, well-thought out email as to why your article would fit well with and benefit their site, ezine, or newsletter. Then include the article, pasted into the email, and wait for a response. If you haven’t heard in say, two weeks, send another, nicely-written reminder email.

Can you send the same article out to multiple sources? As a seasoned magazine feature writer, multiple submissions of the same article were the quintessential no-no unless you made it abundantly clear in your cover letter that you were doing so. The same holds true here, but with a caveat. Don’t send the same article to competing sites, ezines, and newsletters. Do some creative analysis to find other venues that will be interested in the topic from another viewpoint, and perhaps even modify it a bit to fit their audiences more precisely.

So think carefully about your article strategy, and instead of numbers of links, think quality of links, just like the search engines do when crawling your website.