If you have a website then you will constantly be looking for ways to promote it. If you have not yet used article directories then you should consider it as they can be a huge advantage to your website and business. The aim of this article is to explain article directories, how you can use them and why they will benefit your business.

What are Article Directories?

Article directories work in a similar way to normal online directories, the only difference is that they list articles and not websites or businesses. Most of them allow you to set up a free account and to add as many articles as you like.

When you post an article you add your article to a relevant category and add a resource box at the bottom where you will be able to add a link to your website. They will probably each have a list of rules for post such as length, keyword density and many other rules. You need to make sure you abide by these to ensure your article is accepted.

Benefits of Article Directories

So now you know what article directories it is important to know why you should use them. Well when you post an article as mentioned before you can place a link to your website in the resource box. The great thing about these links is that you can set the anchor text yourself. By using these links correctly you can significantly help your search engine optimisation campaign.

Another advantage is that the high quality article directories will have good SEO themselves. This means that people search for information that your article covers may come across your article on the search results. If they find it interesting they may follow the link at the bottom and so giving you traffic to your website from people that already think you have something good to say. If you direct them to the right page you have a high chance of making a sale.

How to Write Your Articles

When you write your articles you need to make sure you take search engine optimisation into account. So you need to consider the keywords you are optimising for and make sure those keywords appear up to 5% of all of your content. This is the same idea as you would follow on your own website to ensure you have the best chance of getting you content appearing in the search engines.

You also need to make sure you keep your articles useful. If they are something that people might want to know about then your chance of getting traffic from them is much greater. If it is useless irrelevant content then you will be adding nothing to the user experience and so your chance of getting traffic from them will be very slim.

Getting the Most

To get the biggest benefit out of your articles it is important to write as many articles as possible on a regular basis. I personally aim to write around 7 articles a week and submit them out to the article directories I use. This is great because the search engines like to see new links to your website. So if they are seeing new links to your site all the time then they see your website as more important which increases your chance of getting those illusive first page rankings.

You should also think about the article directories you submit to. The more that you can manage to get your articles on the better as this greatly increase your chance of capturing people that will read your article and find it useful.

So if you are not yet using article directories to market your website you should seriously consider starting.