Article Marketing Purpose: SEO or Actual Traffic?

A lot of directories are dofollow so you get both benefits. The real SEO value comes when your article is republished by other websites, hopefully those with high PR and huge followings.

Tina

Article directories are aimed at clickthrough, just because it is nofollow, in reality it is, as they follow through to your blog as a customer even if google does not follow through.

Traffic and getting links. But it's really hard to dealing with article submissions. Even if you've follow the right way of submitting your article, some of my submission disapproved.

Personally I use them more for SEO than for the traffic. However, if I write something controversial or with a gripping title, I tend to get more traffic, as well as the backlinks.

It depends upon your site and how many people are looking for content.

One of the best ways of generating an article that gets re-published and 'goes viral' is to create a list article: 'Top 10 Ways to do X' or 'The 5 Biggest Mistakes When Doing X'. Sadly, the negative ones (like the mistakes) play bigger, thanks in part to the way we're conditioned by the media to be drawn to the negative.

Hope that helps.

"no follow" = no dice in my book.

Links must have anchor text (unless the PR is really high) and be "do follow".

SEO means traffic. Don't try to separate the two.

There is value in both sides of that question. One of the online marketers I advise has a very, very narrow niche site that promotes physical products as an Amazon affiliate. He doesn't worry much about SEO and having his site rank high in Google for particular search terms (if the pages from his site do turn up high then that's a bonus). Instead, he publishes tons and tons of articles in just about every directory known to man, and he has a very well-crafted and tested resource text which leads readers of the articles right through to his site.

His conversion rate is quite high, but as I explained, he's not focused on the articles boosting SEO, he's focused on the human clicks and not the SE spiders.

When you make a commitment to your readers, giving them what they want, then you can achieve both Direct Click Through Traffic and SEO...

If you neglect readers by producing garbage, SEO is your only hope...

But, the article directories should never be seen as the ultimate article marketing event... If an article directory does not have real people looking at your article, it likely does not have any respect from the search engines either...

In the ideal world, you want to have your articles published on websites that have a loyal audience, and an audience willing to link to your articles on their favorite websites...

When your article appears on someone else's website, and its readers link to your article, then your article will have real link popularity to pass back to your website...

Thus my opinion is that the SEO-only approach is a real gamble and a prayer, but the Traffic Plus SEO approach will deliver more reliable results to you for the investment you have made in your article marketing campaign...

Anybody here use articlebase.com?

I use it as a two-fer when I outsource my articles, backlinks and good traffic initially

It really does depend on your niche. I for one used EZA for traffic alone in various health niches for years. Still do....kind of!

Both, Create different unique variations of your seed article however when posting them on other article sites and try different titles as well. This is a quick way to maximize the exposure and possibly get more then one article ranked on search engines and indexed.