I thought it would be nice to make this post and more to point, share my joy with all three of you that may be reading it. Over the last few weeks I’ve started experimenting with writing articles and distributing them to see if it would help with SEO.

What is Article Distribution for SEO?

In short, article distribution is writing articles that are focused on your market sectors target audience. The articles could be news worthy stories or anything else you feel people would like to read about. You then submit the article to websites that display them. There are even services dedicated to distributing articles. I would recommend Articlesender which is one of the best distributors I’ve used and completely free.

When submitting your article you can normally add what’s known as a bio box. The bio box is displayed at the end of the article and is your chance to inform people who wrote the article. You can add a link to your site in the bio box.

If your article is accepted and posted on the site, it should be indexed by the search engines. So you will now have a new one way link pointing to your site. People who are looking for content to publish on their site or ezine may find your article and choose to use it. The rules are if they do use your article they have to include your bio box with the links.

Does it work for SEO?

I don’t know? Not yet anyway. I’m still tracking the results of the few articles I’ve wrote and distributed so far (some of which I’ve posted on SEO Forum Watch). There is a good thread over at WebWorkShop discussing the same question and I came across an interesting discussion on Matt Cutt’s blog. Matt didn’t directly say article distribution doesn’t help Google SEO but did say he felt sites that simply reproduced articles where not adding any value to the web. Whether that means Google discredits links from article distribution sites or sites reusing the content I don’t know. But as mentioned before I’m tracking the articles to find out if any SEO benefit is happening on what search engines.

Other Benefits of Article Distribution

The last article I published did however produce significant traffic. The article titled “The SEO Snowball Effect” was picked up and used by both WebProNews.com and WebProNews.co.uk. This had the effect of referring traffic from their site through the bio box link on the article to the company I work for. Looking at our stats I could see in two days WebProNews had referred just over 180 visitors to our site. We even had someone requesting a SEO campaign because they read the article.

In my opinion this is where article writing is going perform. If you can write articles of such quality, that the authority sites in your sector use them. Then your going to get both targeted traffic and recognition of being an expert because of your association with them.

I will be posting more on this when I get evidence of whether article distribution has any SEO benefit. I’ve got a feeling it will work on Yahoo and MSN but not the big G. If I fail to make another post before Christmas or you fail to make it back, have a great Xmas and a good new year.