What the Search Engines Look For
Search engines send out computers to "crawl" sites online. These computers are referred to as "spiders" since they see websites like a big web. They follow links from site to site and make website and keyword "connections" within their databases when they find relevant information that will be useful for their users. When your article is added to the databases by the spiders, they use your keyword density & content along with their "page rank" algorithm to determine where to place your listing in the search engine. If you follow the techniques that we've discussed above, you will have a much better chance of getting listed under the keywords that you choose.
Article directories are constantly getting crawled by the search engine spiders because they always have new content being added to them. A site like Squidoo.com (or other top article directories) get crawled constantly, and they will bring spiders to your articles as soon as they submit. Since sites like Squidoo.com have a high page rank within Google, you only need to be concerned about the keyword density and content aspects of your article.
When a spider comes to your page, it strips out all of your images, videos or other media that make your page look nice to a "real" person, and focus on the content alone. They look at the title of your page, your headlines, links, and most importantly, the bulk of the content that makes up your page. The spider will then start creating a list of phrases that it feels your page focuses on. These phrases are then placed into the search engine databases along with the url to your article. The algorithms for displaying the search results in Google, or other search engines, then decide how relevant your phrases are to search queries that people search for.
By optimizing your articles for certain keyword phrases, you are essentially telling the search engine spiders to store display your article for those phrases. Optimizing the content of your article is the most important part of article marketing. To get those top listings for free, you need to follow the guidelines in this course.
Blogs vs. Article Directories vs. Your Own Domain
As mentioned above, search engine spiders crawl web sites and articles by following links. Article directories have a very optimized linking structure so that the spiders can easily find your articles. A common question we receive is how blogs (web logs) compare to article directories. The simple answer is that they are not as effective in getting a top listing quickly.
Blogs do not have an internal linking structure that is optimized to bring the spiders to the page. Once a spider gets to your blog it will crawl the links within, but it takes quite a few more steps in order to get a spider to your blog than it does to your articles on an article directory.
Another benefit to using an article directory is that in most cases they have a high page rank (PR). Google uses page rank to help determine the "importance" of the domain. The more important the domain, the higher the pages on that domain will be in the search engines. So, by posting an article to an article directory, you are utilizing the page rank of that domain to your advantage.
Blogs like "blogger.com", or "wordpress.com" have high PR, but if you create a blog that lives on your own domain, you won't be able to leverage the page rank. This makes it much more difficult to get a listing. Getting a search engine to list a website that you own in the search engines is even more difficult.
As an article marketer you should focus on finding audiences, products, and writing the content for your articles. If you use an article directory you will not need to focus on getting the search engine spiders to your pages as much as you would have to if you posted on a blog, or on your own website.
Our recommendation is to use the following article submissions sites:
We will be discussing each of these in detail later. All you need to know right now is that these are our recommendations for where to submit your articles to. Article submissions sites are of no use to you just yet because you have not written an article. Once you have your article we will walk you through exactly how submissions work.
- StreetArticles.com
- Squidoo.com
- ArticlesBase.com
- Hubpages.com
- Goarticles.com
- UsFreeads.com
- EzineArticles.com
- AssociatedContent.com
- WetPaint.com
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