I’m often asked, “Pat, what are the best article sites on the Web?” There are definitely some in the forefront, in my opinion.

You can’t go wrong posting to EzineArticles.com. They run a tight ship, the content has to be quality or their editors don’t take it and everyone knows EZA. It’s got tons of traffic coming to it every single day. That’s my #1 place, for sure.

GoArticles.com is good because they still allow you to add anchor text to your articles. (Hyperlinked keyword phrases.) This is great for SEO, and provides reputation for your site. The worse thing you can do is to link “Click Here,” as it gives you little SEO benefit at all. But having an anchor text link (as you see above with “keyword phrases”) from a good site is worth the effort of submitting at all.

ArticlesBase.com is making its way to the top. The site now sports a PR5 and an Alexa of 810. Very strong. (Lower is better with Alexa.com) So, adding articles here is also a good idea.

But also think about social content sites like Squidoo, HubPages.com, and Scribd.com, which are all great sites to submit your content pieces.

Don’t bother submitting to any site that has a high Alexa, say over 100,000. That’s pretty much a waste of time because those directories/sites get little traffic. Stick to submitting to places where people will see your stuff and click on your link to come to your website.

Also stay away from Google Knol. I read an article today saying that it may not make it to its 2nd birthday as traffic has dropped so dramatically. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but here’s the thing: Keep an eye on which sites are rising in popularity and which sites are waning. Things change over time, and you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket and then, have the basket fall apart.

iSnare.com is another good option. For $2 U.S., they will distribute your content to 40,000 websites, newsletters, and ezines. That’s not to say you’ll be placed in all of them because it’s an editor’s decision whether or not to accept your piece, but for $2, you really can’t lose.

Article marketing is still extremely powerful. Using it for SEO purposes is critical, and the cool thing about it is that your articles will stay online, bringing traffic and boosting your reputation and SEO forever.

If you don’t like to write, get someone to do it for you. Just don’t underpay. Sure, you can get folks with little command of the language to write for $1, but the articles won’t be much good. You want someone who understands your niche and who can write in your language. The going rate for a good article? About $10 at least. If you want a solid SEO article, you may have to pay around $15. But it’s worth it to have an article that will keep your reputation strong. Put a bunch of garbage out there and you know what they say…

Garbage in; garbage out. Not very helpful to your online success. You want to build your reputation as an expert in your niche. Nobody will buy it if you’re putting out poorly written articles that make no sense.

For that reason, also stay away from article spinners, unless you review the articles and make proper changes to them before submitting. Don’t just let a site or software spin articles and pop ‘em out there. You’ll hate the results. Most spinners don’t work, but there are a few that might and they require rewriting of your article paragraph by paragraph. I’ve done that for Overcome Everything, and I can tell you, it’s a LOT of work.

Unless you plan to do nothing else, my advice is to write or buy two good, solid content pieces a week and submit them to one of the sites I mentioned above, and you’ll still achieve excellent results over time.

spider_webI have a few cool plugins for Firefox, but one of my favorites is “Search Status.” Here are some things it does:

  • It provides not just Google Page Rank, like the Google Toolbar does, but Alexa ranking of any page you land on as well. And these ranks sit in your lower toolbar and you can see it automatically. You can also see a compete rank and an mozRank, which measures the link juice coming into that site, as well.

When you right click on the Search Status symbol (an @, but with a q in the middle), it will show you the following about any site you visit:

  • Highlights “no follow” links. Want to see if a blog is allowing spiders to follow links? Turn this option on and all “no follow” links appear in little pink boxes. You may want to use this when considering the site’s link potential.
  • Gives you a link report on. How many are coming in/going out? How many of them are follow links?
  • Shows the META tags and description
  • Shows what the site looked like historically.
  • Gives you robots.txt, whois, and sitemap
  • Provides the keyword density and highlights any keyword you choose
  • Shows all pages indexed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now bing.com)
  • Shows the sites linking back in Google, Yahoo, and MSN

So, you can learn much of the SEO data just from this little plugin. Of course, some of it overlaps with the data you get from SEO Quake, but I think you really need both plugins to have a fully functional SEO browser. I mean, there are other SEO add-ons for Firefox, but these are 2 I couldn’t do without.

And if you want a firm foundation in SEO, visit http://SpiderLanguage.com

So, I was over at SEOmoz.org today, which is a very cool site. There are tutorials and tools out the ying-yang, which is sweet. But the one thing that took up about twenty minutes of my lunchtime today was the SEO test. How cool is that? You can measure your understanding of SEO.

I did well, though not as well as I’d have liked. I’m always leery of tests, you know. I always assume that what I’m seeing is a trick question, and pick the wrong answer instead of an obvious one. Testers are a sneaky bunch, you know? :-)

But here was the question:

“What of the following is the WORST criterion for estimating the value of a link to your page/site?”

Hmm… there were about 5 choices, but what stuck out at me right away was “Alexa.” I was ready to click that radio button, when I saw Google toolbar page rank.

Toss up?

The Alexa ranking is so nebulous. It means bupkiss, really. Here’s what SEOmoz.org had to say about it:

Since Alexa data is typically less useful (http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-blog-stats) than monkey’s throwing darts at a laptop, that’s the obvious choice for worst metric. The others can all contribute at least some valuable insight into the value a link might pass.

OK, totally true, except… Google toolbar. Brad Fallon told me personally that it means very little because it’s never current. Your page rank changes constantly, but they only update the toolbar about once a quarter.

So, that to me means that PR is also questionable, but it’s obvious where I went wrong. It’s not the WORST indicator of a valuable link. Duh. It’s not a clean estimate, but in the ballpark. Duh again.

Course that’s SEO. Not everyone agrees with everyone else. Want to know what’s right? What works through testing, testing, testing.

Anyway, it was a trick question. LOL

Shouda picked the obvious… Alexa.

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