by Carole , 1/2/2006

If you write articles, you probably know how important it is to use keywords in helping to get them indexed by search engines, and in getting the attention of publishers who might want to use your content.

Most people submit articles to directories while maintaining a copy on their website, often creating two nearly identical copies on the web. But is this really an effective approach? When a web user is looking for an article to read - do you want them to read it from your website, or from the article directory?

Here are some considerations:

• You want to get maximum exposure in article directories so that publishers will pick up the content.
• You want to get top ranking in search engines to pull in traffic.
• You don't want the article directory's copy of your article to have a higher ranking in search engines than the copy on your website. When this happens, they get all the benefits of having their Adsense ads clicked on among other links on the site. Considering your link in the article is often at the bottom of the page, your chances of the visitor going to your site is cut dramatically.

You essentially have 2 kinds of traffic: general web users looking for information & publishers looking for content. The goal is to find a strategy where you can direct web users to your site, and let article directories be the targeting source for publishers.

So, what is the solution?

In my own experiments, I learned that by creating two sets of keywords (one set for the directory copy, another set for the copy on my site), I could not only tackle these issues - it actually gave me the advantage of creating a much wider reach in the search engines.