Article submission generally refers to the writing of articles that are relevant to your online business and then getting them added to the popular article submission directories.

The main purpose behind article submission is to attract a large number of visitors (and links) to your website without incurring a great cost. Obviously, it is important to make sure that the articles you intend to submit are directly related or relevant to your business.

There are various benefits of article submission including advertising, marketing and publicity of your business on the World Wide Web. Two of the main benefits are:

1. Article submissions can enhance and improve the ranking of your online business in search engines by increasing the quantity of back-links and PR.
2. Another benefit that article submission offers is that of establishing the particular website owner as an expert in their industry. By providing valuable detail and information within articles, it builds the trust of potential customers thereby giving them a reason to visit your website.

5 key points to consider while writing articles

During the process of article submission do not forget to consider below 5 key points. Following these points will meet the purpose of both i.e. your target audience and search engines.

1. Articles should be original and information rich.
2. Articles should be keyword-rich but not excessive to the point of keyword stuffing.
3. The average length of articles should be between 500 and 700.
4. Give a unique title to your article with main keywords included in it so as to make it easy for web crawlers to identify and classify the topic of your article.
5. Giving subheadings, bullets and numberings to articles make it presentable and easy to read for potential customers.

Article marketing is a low cost advertising avenue that can be explored by many online businesses to promote their services/products. Articles can help you increase the credibility of your business within its market as well as attract new potential clients.

A great way to write your articles is to write about an interesting topic using “smart terms” as your main subject. “Smart terms” are specific keyword niches used in your articles. Articles can be distributed via simple syndication methods which furthers their distribution to content publishers that cater to those markets, thereby helping in obtaining free press space. Each article contains an author’s bio to provide references and contact information of your business. The body and the bio of the article allow you to provide hyperlinks that point to your website, thus generating more links that lead back to the website. As a result, over a period of time, as these articles get picked up by the search engines, you manage to create mass backlinks to the relevant pages of your website.

This not only enables you to get your articles to rank for smart terms that may not be possible to target on your website (a spello for example) but also gain an SEO value through the mass backlinks. All this eventually helps drive visitors to your website through the article.

You can write on a wide array of subjects and gain a lot of popularity through viral propagation, [also known as social media optimization ] via social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and social bookmark websites like Digg & Del.icio.us.

If you own an e-commerce website that markets a new product, it will require a considerable amount of time to get your product page indexed by the search engine spiders, acquire an SEO value & begin to rank. Hence, considering the amount of time involved for the above, there’s a high possibility that by the time your product page just manages to rank well you would miss out on a great opportunity to sell huge volumes of the product.

Article marketing could be a great way to counter this problem. You could write & distribute an article talking about your new product, build links within the body directly to your product page & the bio talking about the credibility of your business. Thus, the exposure to the deep pages of your website and number of backlinks to them can be increased greatly.