Article Submission Increases Your Websites Reach & Link Building Efforts.

There are two link building benefits of submitting articles, as part of your SEO Plan, if used carefully and sparingly.

1. Firstly you can include links to your website content that will be seen by visitors outside of your own blog’s circle or reach

2. Secondly, quality SEO backlinks help increase your PageRank and Authority

Article websites are sites that allow for articles to be submitted under relevant categories.

Many websites that charged for articles to be submitted were hit hard from Google Panda updates, that brought about a change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm. The change lowered the rank of low-quality site pages, especially having duplicate or plagiarized content, and promoted high-quality website pages higher in search results. The article sites affected the most were generally automated, meaning anyone could list anything under any category, with no regards to accuracy of information or good SEO practices and contained an author Bio at the end of the article that contained links.
These days, articles submitted are checked to see if the content is already on the web, so not open to poor practices, such as spamming and therefore can be a great source of SEO friendly backlinks.

Even so, before article submission to another website, research the directory before submitting anything. The following list is what should be looked at prior to listing an article:

• Article category classifications available

• Number of articles listed under the category relevant to yours

• PageRank of the directory site

• Alexa rank

• Number of indexed pages in Google

• How existing articles perform in SERP’s

The following checklist is what you should have saved ready for most article submissions:

1. Your article (750-1,000 words long) with links included, containing tags, back to a relevant page on your website

2. Your website’s blog’s RSS feed URL

3. Your website’s social profile URL’s for at least the 2 most popular social media sites, Twitter and Facebook

There is much said about the reduced benefits of article submissions these days, to the extent that it is not recommended, like it one was. This is true in part.
Submitting poorly written articles full of links to websites that contain a lot of articles that are poorly written containing lots of ‘spammy’ links is not a good practice.
However, there is SEO benefit in submitting articles to websites that are well structured and provide good quality content, those that have proved themselves and have a high PageRank.
ABC and Health and Wellbeing Australia are examples of websites that contain articles that rank highly in SERP’s, making them perfect for article submission.