The EzineArticles directory is the best-known and most-cited article directory on the Web. Due to its stringent editorial guidelines it has garnered a high level of trust in Google and other search engines. This is a good thing for anyone willing to spend the time and effort in creating original articles for submission to the directory. If you choose your keywords carefully (especially when crafting the title) and use good anchor text and calls to action in the resource box, your articles will over time generate substantial traffic to your site. (It also makes money for EzineArticles, since some percentage of readers will click the AdSense ads instead of following the link(s) to your site. That’s the price you pay for the traffic, although of course it doesn’t actually cost you anything in real terms.)
There’s another way you can use EzineArticles, though, and that’s as a source of free content for your own blogs and websites. All you have to do is follow EzineArticles’ publishing guidelines.
Take, for example, my article BlackBerry Applications: What Software Developers Need To Know which primarily drives traffic to my BlackBerry consulting landing page. Having other sites republish that article gives me more backlinks and more traffic.
Republishing an article is quite simple. First you search for an appropriate article. One you’ve found one you like, click the EzinePublisher link to the right of the article title. (For a live example, just click this link to open the EzinePublisher page for my own article in a separate window — it’ll make it easier to follow the rest of this article.)
The page you get provides two versions of the article for republication. An HTML version and a plain text version. In most cases you’ll be interested in the HTML version, because you’ll be republishing it on a blog or site you own. Select all the text for the appropriate version and copy it into the clipboard. Paste the text into your favorite HTML or text editor. Strip out a few things: the <html>, <head>, <title> and <body> tags at the top and bottom. Don’t change the content, though, that’s against the guidelines. All links have to be left as-is!
You can simply copy and paste the article into a WordPress post and be done with it. However, I recommend you do a couple of simple things to add some extra value. First, create your own title for the post/page. Leave the article title unchanged as a heading, but make sure the <title> tag of your post/page has a different (but related) title. This lets you fine-tune the title for SEO/traffic purposes, especially if the original article title (which you’re leaving unchanged in the body of the page/post) isn’t optimized.
Second, add a blurb at the top introducing the article. This is a short paragraph or two that summarizes the article or tells the reader why it’s good, etc. You could in theory just take the article summary that you’ll find on the EzinePublisher page (near the bottom — there’s also a list of keywords there) but I prefer to write my own summary. Gives it a dash of uniqueness, which is good. You can also insert links to other pages you have or even links to affiliate products and so on into that blurb, which you can’t do with the content itself. (For extra credit, add a different blurb at the bottom of the article as well.)
The key is to make the pages useful to your readers. Good article selection (don’t take any old article you find) and a few simple editorial tweaks (the title and blurb) and good site organization will make a quality site in just a couple of hours.
You can do this with other article directories, of course. Same idea, just different source.
I hope you’ve found this information useful. By the way, I sell a tool (only $10) that makes it easy to find niche articles on EzineArticles and Article Dashboard — give it a look!
Yes i really found this information useful!!!! Thank
Clever skill. But I’m wondering if you leave the original author name and post link as well? If not, we will become the thieves, rite?
I have to agree ezine is one of the best article directories around. They really make sure the articles they include are quality articles by having a rigorous set of rules on article submissions.
EzineArticles is the great place to find free articles.
Its tough to get articles approved in ezine,if you stuff it with keywords..But due to its Google authority it’s worth if your keyword stuffed articles get approved.
Hello,
Very solid info. I agree that I’d rather write my own stuff but is there nay concern for me submitting my content to their site in an effort to get links ? When I submit an article there ( I have submitted many), it is original and not previously published anywhere else on my sites or any others. No risk for me there right ?
Thanks
Uhmm, to be honest I think that using duplicated content isn’t that good for SEO purposes.
On the other hand, it’s always a solution for people too lazy to write their own unique content…
Duplicate content isn’t necessarily bad. If you choose good alternate titles and write some good introductions and conclusions you can rank for long tail keywords that the original EzineArticles article doesn’t….
Eric
That’s right. For this purpose was created the -blockquote- tag.
You can copy some parts of an article but you have to add your own comments.
Adding a blurb to an article republish from article directory is a great idea. Gives you the benefit of having lots of contents written by others while having the flexibility to add your own message.
Good stuff.
I have built a number of websites using EzineArticles. It is a great resource.
Id really love to see more info about the “duplicate content” issue.
Has anyone experienced a penalty from using articles?
I have had articles of mine republished and being the original writer (and first to have that article indexed) I have experienced no problems, But I am a little wary of publishing content that can be found on dozens of websites.
Your detailed opinion would be appreciated.
Before you use an article from a directory like ezine do a search from a phrase in the article. If it only comes up a few times you should be ok. Some of them will be posted on dozens of sites and article directories.
I would highly agree with you that writing articles and submitting it to ezine-articles is highly beneficial. Not specifically only for getting traffic to your site. I actually don’t regard the traffic from my articles as real and targeted. But I am much more into the links. Off course there would be some of them that could be interested in your service or program you promote. But getting 1 backlink from ezine-articles, is like getting 100 backlinks from articlesbase/ goarticles. THAT is how much authority it has. From what I have seen: Sites with only 2 links from 1 ezine article, ranks #6, #7 and #4 out of competitive search phrases some from nearly 3 million search results. Absolutely phenomenal!
The duplicate content penalty doesn’t exist, or at least its not a penalty.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html
Thanks for the great info – I’ll be sure to make use of it. I was wondering though – is there a way to get articles automatically through the RSS feed? It seems to me that those only contain snippets…
Yes we got lot of benefit from ezine through our articles google love ezine then the other sites.. but i have one question about republishing issue.. if we republish any of ezine article in our blog or site can we get any benefit from that.. bcoz google not index any of duplicate content. and they going to strict to more strict day by day then why we republish any of article in our blog? just for info for our visitor..?