I see many posts here about "where to get links from" .
Article marketing is one of the best free methods to build links from relevant web pages. This method is excellent for the long run but in order that all your work will be beneficial it has to be done correctly or you might be flagged as spammer by Google.

What do you get with article marketing?
  • You get exposure
  • You are strengthening your acknowledgment
  • You get valuable links to your website that will improve your search engines ranking (quality backlinks are the key ingredient to strong search engine rankings)
  • Other blogs and websites can reprint your articles including the links so your links popularity increases all the time in a viral manner.

Almost every point I'll mention here is debatable and represent my standing on this topic.

It used to be that you write an article and submit it to as many article directories trying to gain as many links as possible from as many places on the web as possible. Times are changing and search engines tend to prefer quality over quantity and as times passes they know better and better how to differentiate quality from quantity. Search engines especially Google declared war on duplicated content (what is considered duplicate content is a subject for another thread). As per my understanding for duplicated content is that there are some levels of duplicated content. The worst level is the same content on different pages of the same website. Less severe level is the same content on different websites, Google still shows the same article but usually it will be from the strongest sites and it seems that they disregard all the other weak article directories.

Because of the mentioned above it seems that submitting to as many as possible article directories is not the way anymore. When I submit articles I have two lists of article directories. One for the GENERAL strong article directories and another one is for article directories that SPECIALIZE in my niche. Relevancy is very important factor and if I had to choose between general and relevant I choose the latter.

Remember, link building is just a technique to reach your targeted audience. You want to fish where the fish are, right?

For better results it is good to make some rewriting to each article in the Title, first and last paragraph and the Resource box (change the anchor text)

The general directories that I submit to are:
ezinearticles.com
articledashboard.com
ideamarketers.com
goarticles.com

You will have to generate the real estate article directories list yourself :-)

The content of the article should be quality and inrmative that will add value to the reader. It can be tips on how to avoid common mistakes... or how to save money on a procedure... you get the idea

Very important: Until now you just set the domino infrastructure, now you have to make it work with a small effort but essential. You have to use web2.0 tools for that. It means that you have to bookmark (del.icio.us etc) the articles and use the social news network (digg, propeller etc) or any other web2.0 tools that the specific directory provides.

I hope you'll find this post useful. If you do then START WORKING ON YOUR ARTICLES :-)