Three Things You Must Do Before You Submit To Article Directories

To all writers and non-writers out there, now is the time to start digging up those creative writing skills.With modern communication technology comes the popularity of information-based marketing, which is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. This is

1. Submit your main website to social book marking places and make your bookmarks public.

So many people with blogs over look this. I know of several websites that have every article on their website social bookmarked, but they forgot to bookmark the most important one, their main page.

These simple bookmark websites on the internet are insanely powerful for traffic. Each bookmark, that is public, will be indexed by search engines, so as a result you will get multiple search engine pages with your website. A very nice side effect of this is that most of the listings will be not be omitted by search engines as other relevant listings; instead you can expect to get multiple listings on a search engine, instead of just one listing, or the indented listing which shows only two links to people searching the web. A good example, if you type in Howbits on google you will see multiple results for my website from other websites, and most are social bookmarking places.

So my recommendations are to come up with a good description about your website, your popular tags, and submit it to social book marking websites. Make sure your profile is shared via public, and not private, I have seen some people go through this process and forget to make their profile public.

On a side note, when you have these book marking websites linking to you, the search engines checks the tags from these websites that you have entered and conclude that since you have the same tags on your website AND on the bookmark to your website, that these tags must be important for your website, so it will give you a increase on keyword ranking in search engines. You can do this for each page on your website that you want traffic to get to.

At the bottom of this post I will put a list of common book marking websites; there are tens of hundreds of websites like these out there. Make sure to utilize them so they work in your favor, this means use good tags, and descriptions.

Authors Note: When I say Social Bookmarking websites, I do not mean websites like Digg, Propeller, Slashdot, etc, only submit articles to these places, submitting just a website will get you banned. Only submit / add your website once to bookmarking websites, not multiple times, there is no gain from this, except a ban. Do not make multiple accounts on these websites and promote and book marked your own stuff with these accounts.

2. Use h1 and h2 headers tag when possible in a page or post

I read a lot of blogs through out the day, and I see people using Bold and Font sizing, over the use of a Header Tags. It seems that so many people don't realize it, but search engines give more weight to what's in between header tags, then what is wrote on the page.

Search engines are getting smarter as the days pass, and how they figure out what content your website has and who they should show your link to, is based on the story you have painted for them. They believe that whatever you type in these tags must be pretty important and relevant to the page / post. So they read and interpret the information between these tags as best as possible and get a good story about what the page is about.

When you use bold and font sizing, well to search engines, this means nothing. Another piece of advice, stay away from using * ! ^ # in these tags, and other random characters. Try not to use empty ranking words like AND, THE, IS, ARE, A, etc, in these titles, they mean nothing to search engines.

3. When using forums, put your Website Address in the signature area and in your profile.

Several forums are searched on a daily basis by search engines and you will end up getting a link to your post, and depending on what you wrote about, people will find it and see a link to your website at the bottom of your post. Most forums do not utilize the nofollow script which prevents rank sharing and BOT searching, which means you will get another link to your website, fairly easy way of getting links.

Words of advice - Don't post spam and junk on these websites and your post will stay a long time, possibly until the website disappears on the internet. One nice benefit about forum use, if you change your website address, just go to your profile change your signature to reflect the new website, and all your old post signatures will automatically update. By the time the search engines come by again, everything is updated and back to getting you traffic and ranking.

A word of advice, if someone tells you to keyword stuff your page above a 8 - 12% keyword ratio, then this person has no idea about SEO. If you hide keywords and use white text on a white background you will get banned from search engines. It may not be today, or tomorrow but it will happen. Now a days keyword stuffing doesn't help, it comes down to the location of the keywords, Header tags, descriptions, Titles, anchor tags to your website, etc, like I said, paint a good picture to the search engines about your website.

I hope this helps people with their websites to get better search engine ranking and ultimately, to get traffic. There is no reason to submit / add your website multiple times, just do it once and thats all.

Some of the Bookmarking websites I use

del.icio.us

Diigo

Connectedy

Connotea

FeedMeLinks

Furl.net

Google Bookmarks

Yahoo Bookmark

Jumptags

netvouz

spurl

BibSonomy

Blogmarks

Mister-wong

These websites are search and indexed all the time, so don't be surprised if you see your website showing up all over the internet in a few minutes to a couple of hours.

This is a HUGE list of bookmarking websites if you follow this link. If you bookmark your website at only 25 - 30 of them, you will notice a boost to your website ranking and search engine results in a short amount of time.

If you like my Articles, Please visit my Blog at http://howbits.com

"Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge." --Mark Twain