How To Judge Article Directories

While writing and submitting articles is an important marketing task that has proven to be effective for several years now, taking the time to submit to some article directories, also known as article repositories and article banks, is just a waste.  The next time you submit your articles, take some extra time to weed out the ones that aren’t worth visiting anymore.

Some article directories have been abandoned. A good way to figure this out is to look at the date of the ‘most recent’ submissions. Since many of the better directories manually approve articles, if the date of the last recent addition was several months – or even years – ago, you know that you can take that particular directory off of your submission list.

Use toolbars to determine whether you want to submit or not. Alexa rating and Google Page Rank can both be added to your toolbar so that you can see the Alexa Rating and Page Rank for every site that you visit. You can get these from http://www.alexa.com and http://www.google.com respectively.

Google rates pages on a scale of one to ten. The higher the number, the better the search engine views the site. In other words, it gives that site weight and authority, and it is worth your time to submit to any article directory that has a page rank of five or higher, although it may still be worth your time to submit to sites that have a page rank of three or four. Alexa works the opposite way, and the ratings are based on traffic. The lower the Alexa rating, the better the site is.

Really think about sites that make you jump through hoops to submit an article. Those hoops can eat up a lot of your time. If the site is ranked well, it may be worth the effort. If it isn’t, however, ditch it.

Pay attention to your stats and use tracking links in your resource box when possible. Give it time. In three months, look at your stats for the past three months, and see which directories are producing results, and which ones are not. Consider ditching the ones that are not.