My staff keep reminding me that
I am one of the most prolific writers they have ever seen. I have a
tendency to write 10 to 15 articles a day and a 300 page training
manual in just 2 weeks fully edited ready for publishing which is a
little freakish but I enjoy writing and I enjoy sharing my knowledge
with people. One of the top ways of doing that on the Internet is to
write your articles and submit them to an Article Directory but I have
recently seen some very dark issues creeping in with articles submitted
to some of the article directories.
This has really happened to me...
As a technology geek and yes I will call myself a
geek cause that is what I am, I often write articles on technology
subjects like how to use excel, how to build webpages, etc. However,
when I submitted my articles to five article directories recently I
found some really disturbing aspects to the way they do business and
present my articles. One of the most disturbing issues was that if you
had any domain names or links in either your webpage or in your Author
Bio they stripped them out. If you had used keywords in your Hypertext,
they removed your links and substituted their own to your competitions
website. See, it seems some article directories are now using your work
to advertise other people services within your articles.
When I saw this for the first time, I was
flabbergasted. Not just because somebody else was using my work and
saying that it was their, but more so, they were using my keywords to
hijack my back links back to my website to my competitors. I had also
found from these five article directories that they had licensed my
work to others, so that they could put their names on my articles.
This one issue alone opens up a plethora
of issues with Google, MSN, AOL and Yahoo?
The entire search engines above frown on duplicate
material on websites and by somebody using your material without
permission you could find that anyone of these Search Engines could ban
your site. The really scary aspect to this is that you are not
responsible for this and it really is a form of identity theft and more
copyright infringement.
For all except one of the directories, I was able
to overcome this problem by simply going in and deleting the articles
to reclaim my work and stop my competitors from stealing my work but
one of the directories did not have the capabilities to do this.
So from my experience I have written five
mandatory questions you should be asking your directories so that this
does not happen to you!
Q1. Do I Own The Rights To My Articles?
This seems pretty straight forward but I have
found in the fine print of some article directory sites, it will say
that by submitting your article to this directory that you agree that
the directory now owns the intellectual property of this article. If
you find that, then my recommendation is to run. Most quality
directories do require you to give them a non-exclusive license to
reprint or reuse or redistribute your article and this is quite
acceptable as this is what you want, but you do not at any stage want
to lose your rights to your articles, especially if you are not getting
paid for it.
Q2. Can I Pre-format My Article with HTML
Some directory articles have rules that prevent
you from including HTML in your article. What this means in many cases
is that you cannot format the article the way you want. This can be a
major problem for you if you have bulleted lists or numbered lists as
you can sometimes find these lists are all on one line or not properly
formatted.
I have even seen situations where, I have
submitted articles to this type of article directory only to find that
all my paragraphs are lumped together and the articles look terrible.
The bottom line is this, select your article submission directories
carefully and make sure you can pre-format the article in HTML. I
should note that there are now many Article Submission directories that
allow you to enter articles with full html including pictures.
Q3. Are You Going To Sell or Provide My
Email Address To A Third Party?
Everyone that I know hates spam. Me in particular,
especially since I get around 1,000 spam emails everyday! Be very
careful though, some article directories have written into their
operating agreements that they can pass your email address onto
third-parties. This means, they could sell or supply your email address
to anyone. Most article directories that I deal with, have very strict
policies on protecting your privacy and your emails but some article
directories automatically put your email address up on the article with
your name.
This is as big a problem as someone actually
selling your email address, as some spammers use tools called mail bots
or email bots that look for the html tag mailto and then pickup the
email address after that html tag. This is a big problem for all of us,
as this means the spammers know they have a valid email address, so
ensure when you are choosing an article directory that they do not sell
or provide your email address to any third party plus that they do not
put your email address on the page your article is on.
If you are not sure, have a look at some of the
articles in the article directory as that will give you a pretty good
indication as to the way the articles and email addresses will be
handled.
Q4. Do You Allow Hyperlinks or Domain
Names in your Article Or Author/Bio Line?
The whole reason for you or I writing articles is
so that we can get our work published onto the internet and promote our
business whether it be through back links or from people reading your
article and then deciding to visit your website. If you are not writing
articles for this reason, then I hope you are getting paid a lot of
money cause if you are not getting links back to your website, then you
will not get any traffic.
There are some article directories that do not
allow hyperlinks in the main body of the webpage, where as others do
allow it on special occasions. Some article directories do not even
allow hyperlinks in the Author/Bio Line which as far as I am concerned
means you may as well go elsewhere because if you are not getting at
least a domain name shown in the Author/Bio Line then how are people
going to know where your site is. If you are selecting an Article
directory, make sure in their writing rules area that it specifies that
even if you can have an active domain link, that you can at least have
an inactive domain link or web address link.
A sample of an inactive domain link is
shown to the right - http://www.1-on-1.biz
What this means is that the reader of your article
at the very least can see your domain and can copy and paste your
domain into the address section of the browser. You certainly will not
get as many people visiting your website if you are using inactive
domain links in the Author Bio area but at least if people really want
to see what you have to offer they can get there relatively easily.
Remember one thing, the human race inherently lazy
so if you do not make things as easy as possible your sales will never
soar.
Q5. Do You Allow Hypertext Links in your
Author/Bio Line?
A Hypertext link is one of the most important
links on an article page. Essentially what this type of link is, is
where a person will see normal text but when they click on the text it
will take them to a particular webpage. For example I have included a
Hypertext Link below -
How
to Profit from a Direct Sales Website
I have written the code for the link below. Note
that I have substituted the for [ ] brackets simply for this article.
[a href="http://www.1-on-1.biz/dms.asp"] How to
Profit from a Direct Sales Website[/a]
The link is shown in the a href section and the
text "How To Profit from a Direct Sales Website" is the Hypertext. The
reason it is important for us to structure our links in this way as it
tells the search engines that that page is related to those keywords.
The more times a search engine finds those keywords and links on
different websites, the more points you will accumulate for that page,
and the higher the likelihood that search engine will rank you high
when people use those key terms. I will say though, that SEO technology
is more involved than just that one issue, but it is certainly an
important issue that can make the difference to your webpage being at
the top of the search engine results or at the bottom.
What I mentioned at the start of the article was
that 5 article directories I was submitting articles to were keyword
hijacking my articles. Essentially when they were presenting my
articles in the directory, all my links in the author bio line that
contain the "a href" section were dropped and changed to my competitors
simply because my competitors had paid for that service. Ultimately,
when a user was to click on my keywords and my Author BIO line they
were going to my competitors which I consider a dirty tactic. Keyword
hijacking degrades an article directory because eventually the article
writers wake up to this issue and simply cease putting articles into
the directory and the quality of the directory will die off so all I
can say to those article directories that are doing this, I hope that
you are making lots of money, because this technique is not going to
last.
The bottom line is this, if you are trying to
build your sites traffic, then you are better off spending your time
submitting articles to those article directories that allow you to use
HYPERTEXT in the Author Bio lines. Very few that I know will let your
get away with that in the main article and to be honest, it can
actually get you banned from the article directory.
To finish off ...
Let us be frank here, it takes a lot of work to
build successful websites and it takes even a lot more to write high
quality articles, so why would you want to short change yourself by
submitting your articles to article directories that do not want to
work as equal partners, because remember that whilst you are writing
quality articles for the article directories, you are helping them
build traffic to their website and build their PR ranking with Google.
Both you and the article directory are in fact benefiting from your
work.
Look the bottom line is this ... make
sure you check out and tick off each of these questions -
Q1. Do I Own The Rights To My Articles?
Q2. Can I Pre-format My Article with HTML
Q3. Are You Going To Sell or Provide My Email Address To A Third Party?
Q4. Do You Allow Hyperlinks or Domain Names in your Article Or
Author/Bio Line?
Q5. Do You Allow Hypertext Links in your Author/Bio Line?
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/
article-marketing-articles/five-mandatory-questions-you-need-to-ask-
before-submitting-your-articles-to-an-article-directory-36306.html
About the Author
© Chris Le Roy. I have put together an Ezine
Writers Article Directory Cheat Sheet -Digital
Content Publicity with 69 Article Directories that I
personally submit to and use. The cheat sheet is in PDF Format with
activated hyperlinks to each of the article directories. I also have
available a HTML
Cheat Sheet that outlines the HTML Tags an Ezine Article
Writer should be familiar with.
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