Article Directories
You may have heard from a number of supposedly "authority" sources that using article directories to help a site to rank is a method that no longer works. In fact, many have gone so far as to say that article marketing as a strategy is dead! Well, as far as they know, they may be right.
But you don't have to listen to anyone else, especially when you know more than they do.
This is about the fact that while article marketing in the traditional sense is not very effective, it still has a place in the overall scheme of things when it comes to boosting a site's rank in the search engines index (namely that of Google). And if you're targeting the other main search engines like Bing and Yahoo, it definitely still works.
You need to start with a good article directory list (see: https://thehonestway.com/article-directory-list/) and then do what you always did before the big changes and send out your articles. The difference is that you need to change strategy slightly. If you want to send links to your main site, you need to make sure that you do NOT put your main keyword anchor in the link back to your site. You should just add the bare url for most of the links plus some generic anchors like "click here".
The reason for doing this is to keep your site's link profile below Google's "Penguin" radar which is looking for too many keyword anchor links and penalizing sites that have over a certain percentage (currently believed to be around 10-15%). For the other engines its not an issue, but they count links and the more you have the better you will rank. Also, the more often you create links, the better you will rank because they seem to count this metric as well.
There is another use for article directories. That is to send links with your exact anchor in articles that point not to your main site, but to your second tier of network sites that do point to your main site. The reason for this is that the second tier of sites need to have their authority boosted so the links they are sending to the main site have more authority.
The end result is to achieve a set of high authority links that point to your main site and it will rank better. Don't expect fast results, because ranking changes occur much more slowly than they used to. But you should see a slow steady rise using this method. Enjoy!
But you don't have to listen to anyone else, especially when you know more than they do.
This is about the fact that while article marketing in the traditional sense is not very effective, it still has a place in the overall scheme of things when it comes to boosting a site's rank in the search engines index (namely that of Google). And if you're targeting the other main search engines like Bing and Yahoo, it definitely still works.
You need to start with a good article directory list (see: https://thehonestway.com/article-directory-list/) and then do what you always did before the big changes and send out your articles. The difference is that you need to change strategy slightly. If you want to send links to your main site, you need to make sure that you do NOT put your main keyword anchor in the link back to your site. You should just add the bare url for most of the links plus some generic anchors like "click here".
The reason for doing this is to keep your site's link profile below Google's "Penguin" radar which is looking for too many keyword anchor links and penalizing sites that have over a certain percentage (currently believed to be around 10-15%). For the other engines its not an issue, but they count links and the more you have the better you will rank. Also, the more often you create links, the better you will rank because they seem to count this metric as well.
There is another use for article directories. That is to send links with your exact anchor in articles that point not to your main site, but to your second tier of network sites that do point to your main site. The reason for this is that the second tier of sites need to have their authority boosted so the links they are sending to the main site have more authority.
The end result is to achieve a set of high authority links that point to your main site and it will rank better. Don't expect fast results, because ranking changes occur much more slowly than they used to. But you should see a slow steady rise using this method. Enjoy!