Search engines, we all agree, are critical to the success or failure of your website or online venture. If the search engines don’t find your business within the first page or two of search results, you’re doomed to mediocrity at best, failure at worst. But most of the giant websites have millions of dollars of capital to throw at regular advertising campaigns; you couldn’t advertise at a kindergarten football game, let alone the Superbowl.
But there’s another route for those of us with great ideas and work ethic, but little cash: directory submissions. These are sites that store free articles for sharing, contributed by website owners who get one critical item in return: a resource box with the contributor’s link, formatted in the manner he or she prefers.
And you simply give the article to the directory.
Give A Little, Get A Lot
Most people who hear about this for the first time are appalled. Give away articles? They’re hard to write, time-consuming, and besides, you want them for yourself so you can have fresh content on your own site.
But that’s not the point. Fresh content and search-engine-optimized articles are helpful to a degree to be listed well on the search engines, but links back to your site and the amount of traffic you get are becoming increasingly important. Content today is much more important for keeping the customers that the search engines first send to your site.
If you have good content already, you can gain the audience to enjoy it by donating articles. When you’re listed in an article directory, three things happen: