I have established a sub-domain based article directory at InformationPlease.HeresTheSite.Com. This is to replace the instances of the Article Exchange directories that I decided to terminate.

I am using Submit Your Article as the main  source of the articles at the present time. SYA is an article distribution service. They do claim to manually check articles so the quality is better than with some of the article directories. While the service is not perfect it is the best that I have seen. Most of the articles are up to the Ezine Articles standard.

I am using the ArticleMS directory script with this site. I am accepting direct submissions and invite authors to consider submitting to the site. Your quality original articles would help us both out. For you it will mean a backlink to your site, and for me it would be one more reason for people to visit the site. I can’t offer strong page rank at the present time as I have just established the site, but I am working on promoting it and page rank will build with quality content and traffic.

Visit http://www.informationplease.heresthesite.com/ today and check out the new site!

This is just a quick post to mention that the test bed installation of the ArticleMS article directory is now officially open for business. I added a link to the site nav on my articles.heresthesite.com home page. Primarily this is to let the bots find the installation.

I am continuing testing and tweaking the design there, but I expect to set the script in motion on at least two other sites soon. I am also making a list of other of my sites that may benefit from an installation.

This has also caused me to think of another possible ebook to offer either through Before You Buy or Selling. That will depend on how the script works out in practice.

Stop by the test location and see how the script is working for me. Leave me a comment there under the ‘Initial Impressions‘ article.

I have put the article directory script up on the World Soapox site. I did a minor update of the rest of the site as well. There is more that I should do, but maybe I will wait and see if there is more traffic. I will be reporting the installation to the article-exchange. They will put it on their list and promote the site a bit. Many of the faithful will also begin to include the site in RSS feeds that they create to promote their own articles.

I will be making a post on the Money from the Web blog about this article directory script. I will follow up there at some point with my impression of the value of the script. There are some things that I do not quite understand about this script. The content is pulled from the article directory server. It does not reside on my server and is only displayed when called. I am not sure how material could get indexed on my sites. The content of a WordPress blog resides in a data base and the pages are dynamically built at the time that someone clicks a link to the post, and they get indexed, so maybe this will really appear as content on my site.

I will push a few articles through the system to check for results as well. I will also be announcing this on the Words from the SoapBox blog this evening.

I did look around a bit and saw a few variations of this script. One site had different promotions on the left. There is also a script for WordPress that uses the same database. There is no variation with most of the sites I have seen using the script. I fussed with the css a good bit and shoehorned the directory into my mold as much as possible. The two instances that I have up more or less fit in with the sites design that I had produced. I also took care of a couple of problems with the original design. My instances work better than the originals.

Check out The World SoapBox Article Directory and tell me what you think in a comment here.

I did battle with the article directory script last evening. It was only a skirmish but it did take a while. There is an external CSS file that is editable, you just have to find your way around in it. The location that I have the script in its current state is:  Articles Directory at Articles – Here’s The Site. It does work ok in FireFox but still needs some tweaks for IE-6. I have not checked with the newer versions of IE.

There are pluses and minuses with this script. The script is encrypted so you cannot edit the output aside from the CSS file. I wanted to add a nav bar at the top since the directory is only a part of the site. There is hope of doing this, but not in the normal way. I did trick it into displaying a couple of links, and I later thought of a way to do this better, but having access to the script would make things easier.

An other minus with the script is that there are built-in affiliate links. You can get a reasonable affiliate payout on these links, but they may not be your first choice of things to display on your site. You can add ads in three places in the script, and it is through creative use of this option that I was able to display my own links.

The other drawback to the script is that only the site owner can post articles to the site. There is a library of articles and all articles submitted by other participants are immediately displayed on all of the more than 200 directory sites. If you are looking for a script to start a real article directory site, where people can sign up and submit articles this is not the script for you.

On the plus side, with over 200 of these scripts in operation you do get exposure around the net. With the major article directories you will only get the one backlink unless the article is picked up for publication. There will probably be more individual surfers that are exposed to your article on a high page rank article site, but the link love may not be any better than with this article service. The owner of the script states that he does spot checks on articles posted to the directory and will block further posts if he catches someone not complying with his terms of service, but every article is not necessarily checked by a human editor.

The experience has been interesting and I will be submitting some articles through my site. I will post at some future date if I have positive or negative opinions on this service. In the mean time check out the first instance of my article directory and leave me a comment here if you have thoughts or questions.

Last evening I ran across an article directory script. I have downloaded the script and will be checking the possibility of integrating it with one of my sites. This will be an interesting challenge.

Article directories allow people to post articles to the site. Articles posted to the web are an important source of backlinks. Backlinks are important to a site because they help in placement in the search engine results pages presented to searchers. A page with more backlinks will usually be listed higher than other pages if they contain information relevant to the search terms.

I have a few articles posted to article directories. I have just had my fifth article accepted by Ezine Articles and I have articles posted on GoArticles and Buzzle.com. These articles have directed some traffic to my various sites. An article on a directory site like Ezine or GoArticles may be reprinted by webmasters around the world. At least one of my articles has been picked up for reprint.

The script that I found is part of an article directory network. There are over 150 instances of this script in use around the web. This means that an article submitted to any site running the script appears on all of the other sites, so the opportunity for exposure is at least fair. These sites are not likely to have the traffic that a site like Ezine has, but the articles may stay near the top of the list longer, too. If the script works as advertised I will probably support the site with a few articles on some of the major directories.

I will be checking this out over the next few days and post about the outcome. I had considered doing this a few months ago, but all the pieces of the puzzle were not available at the time. Perhaps this is the final puzzle piece that I have needed to complete this puzzle. Be sure to watch for my further post. If the script is good I will provide a link to the source and I will be providing a link to my instance of the script on my selected site.

Have you tried article marketing? What results have you seen? Leave a comment telling of your experience.