It's not big news that submitting articles to free article sites is one of the best ways to get free one-way links into your sites. However, it's important that you think about your linking strategy when submitting articles, otherwise all of your efforts will be lost. Here's why.
Vary Your Anchor Text
The primary reason you want to submit articles is to get links back to your site, but how are you formatting that link in the resource box? You want to have the anchor text of the links to be the keywords you're wanting to rank for, yes, but it's important that you don't have the same anchor text in every link.
Why? Because if the search engines see that every link to your site contains the exact same anchor text, it's a red-flag that your links were not acquired naturally. People don't always behave the same, and search engines know that it's statistically impossible that every single person who links to your site will use the same link text.
So be sure to vary your link text. I like to reinforce my main keywords while also optimizing for related keywords. For instance, if your site's primary keywords are "kitchen remodeling", you could use a variation like "kitchen remodeling tips" or "kitchen remodeling advice" or "how to remodel your kitchen".
Those anchor texts still help reinforce your ranking for your primary keywords since they contain your primary keywords (or variations), but they also help you rank for lesser terms–and it's the lesser terms that are the easiest to rank for.
So when submitting to article sites, be sure and vary your anchor text, using your primary keywords about 70% of the time. This is simple enough to accomplish: just change your resource box for each site that you submit to.
Submit Slowly to Avoid the Sandbox
There is one school of thought that Google and Yahoo both penalize links that appear too fast. They basically wait for months before actually applying the value of those links to your ranking. This is referred to in the search engine optimization world as "sandboxing".
As of right now, MSN (under it's new name, Live) does not sandbox links. So if you're looking to rank and get some traffic going quickly, getting a lot of links fast will pay off with MSN. You'll just have to wait a while before seeing much results in Google and Yahoo.
If you're trying to rank in Google or Yahoo as quickly as possible, and if you're a believer in the sandbox theory, then you're best bet is to submit to the article sites a little more slowly. Maybe only submit to a few a week. This will cause your links to build more "naturally" from the search engines point of view.
If You're Not a Sandbox Believer…
There are other schools of SEO thought that claim sandboxing doesn't exist at all. Their theory is that it just takes a long time for the algorithm updates to hit Google and Yahoo so that your links are counted. If they are correct, then it's still best to get as many links as possible as quickly as possible, and then just wait for them to be applied.
What I Believe
I tend to lean away from the Sandbox theory myself, but not because I have a lot of emperical evidence that it doesn't exist. It just seems illogical to me for search engines to sandbox links just because they appear quickly.
For example, let's say there's some big news event that happens regarding some web site, and suddenly thousands of links appear from every news site covering that sector. Would it make sense for the search engines to ignore all of those links just because they appeared quickly? It was natural that they appear quickly, since the event was unexpected.
So I tend to believe that it just takes a while to update the rankings for billions of web pages, and therefore the links don't kick in immediately.
Summing it All Up
Whatever your Sandbox beliefs are, you can see that your linking strategy needs to be analyzed before you start submitting to article sites. Take a few minutes to come up with the list of keywords you want to rank for. Try to get at least five or six sets of keywords into your article resource boxes. Don't put all of your keywords into one basket, so to speak.
Taking a little time to plan out your submission strategy could save you from wasting all of that time only to find that the search engines have ignored your links because they think they're "not natural".
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