Printable Editorial Guidelines For Submitting To EzineArticles.com

Editorial Guidelines for Submitting To EzineArticles.com

These editorial guidelines are designed to help you understand what we accept and don't accept for inclusion in our article database. Before you submit to our site, we would appreciate if you would please read this page first.

EzineArticles.com Editorial Guidelines: (CONTENT QUALIFICATIONS)

MUST BE AN ORIGINAL ARTICLE THAT YOU WROTE. If you work for an author as an employee or contractor and are submitting the article, please submit the article as if it was from the original author including his or her email address and name.
MUST NOT BE AN ARTICLE YOU RIPPED-OFF FROM THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR BOUGHT (PLR). If you did hire a ghost writer to write your articles, you MUST have an EXCLUSIVE LICENSE that *only* allows your name to be associated with the articles produced for you. Do not waste your time or ours by buying article packs that have non-exclusive licenses as we reject those articles. Why do we do this? #1) It makes you look like a fraud because you're putting your name on someone else's works that already may have hundreds or thousands of other authors who already put their name on the exact same works and #2) we do not want more than one copy of any article in our directory.
MUST BE informative and share your unique expertise. Include tips, strategies, techniques, case-studies, analysis, opinions and commentary in your articles. We do not accept articles that contain more than 5 lines of quoted or sourced material.
MUST NOT be a press release, advertisement, sales letter, promotional copy, or blatant and excessive self-promotion or hype.
MUST HAVE proper English, spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure. While we know there is a variation in what is considered "proper English," we ask that you at least be consistent within your article. Your article must also be proofed and double checked for accuracy. If English is your second language -- we strongly suggest that you have it proofed by someone who has English as their native tongue before submitting your articles to us.
SIMPLE PUNCTUATION RULES: One or two spaces after each period, colon, or semi-colon; Periods should be inside of quotes; When doing "..." -- you should use only 3 dots minimum and maximum; When using dashes, use two in a row, ex: "--"; There is never a space BEFORE a period or BEFORE a comma.
MUST NOT contain: pornography/adult material, hate or violence-oriented, suggest racial intolerance, advocate against any individual or group, have insulting, obscene, degrading tone, or contain profanity.
MUST NOT contain information on: Hacking/cracking content, bomb creation, support for terrorism/ radicalism/ religious fanaticism, illicit drugs or drug paraphernalia, steroid use or advocacy, weapon/ firearms/ ammunition/ balisongs/ butterfly knives or brass knuckles, or the promotion of hard alcohol/tobacco-related products or prescription drugs.
MUST NOT contain information that promotes: Term papers or essays for sale to college students, PLR (Private Label Rights) articles as a good thing (it's not), the promotion of email Safe-Lists as a good thing (it's not) or bulk email spamming as a good thing (it's not), advocacy for paid auto-surf programs as a good thing (it's not), advocacy of click fraud or clicking on Adsense ads as a good thing (it's not), advocacy of creating MFA's (Made For Adsense) sites as a good strategy (it's not), or advocacy of Adsense Arbitrage (this policy is created to protect our advertisers interests).
MUST NOT contain any content that is a violation of any law, be considered defamatory, libelous, or infringes on the legal rights of others.
MUST NOT be a submission of the exact same article as one that you already submitted. Some authors have submitted the same article multiple times with only a few words changed in the body -- we reject these and ban authors who engage in this practice.
MUST NOT include a reply to a personal email, letter or other correspondence.
MUST NOT contain excessive and/or bolded keywords/ phrases. Bolding is limited to headings and subheadings.

EzineArticles.com Editorial Guidelines: (FORMAT)

ARTICLE TITLE:
1. Your Title MUST Be In Upper and Lower Case Letters With The First Letter of Each Major Word Capitalized.
2. We will not accept your TITLE in all CAPS.
3. It is not required that you capitalize common words such as "a" - "the" - "to" - "for" etc, we accept these either way.
4. We do not accept QUOTES around your entire TITLE.
5. Do NOT end your TITLE with a period.
6. Please do not submit Microsoft Word smart quotes in your TITLE. This includes quotes, apostrophe's, double dashes, and 3 dots in a row. Replace smart quotes with standard quotes/apostrophe's/double dashes/or 3 periods in a row.
7. Refrain from excessive repetitive punctuation in your TITLE. One exclamation "!" or question mark "?" is enough to make a point.
8. We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your TITLE.
9. Your TITLE must begin with the first word flush to the LEFT of the TITLE submission box.
10. We do not allow your AUTHOR NAME or any WEBSITE URL to be in your TITLE.
11. Your TITLE must not be keyword stuffed (too many redundant keywords used over and over again), but rather should read as a natural language TITLE that any human could easily appreciate. Do not over-optimize your TITLE please.
12. We do not allow Prescription Drug names in the title of your article.
13. We do not accept One Word as the article TITLE, a MINIMUM of two unique words is required.
14. We do not accept articles that use slang terms or profanity in the TITLE.
TITLE KEYWORD RICHNESS: Your title should be "Keyword Rich." The first 3-4 words of your TITLE determines the success of the article in terms of how much traffic your article will generate...so choose the first 3-4 words wisely.

Example of a Bad Keyword TITLE:

Top 9 Ways to Acquire Fractional Jet Ownership

Example of a Good Keyword TITLE:

Fractional Jet Ownership - 9 Strategies to Help You Acquire Your Private Jet

Recommended Reading: Article Marketing & Copywriting Secret: How To Make Your Article TITLE Sell
AUTHOR NAME:
1. YOUR FULL AUTHOR NAME: You must include your first and last name as the author of the article.
2. Your AUTHOR NAME must have a First name and a Last name.
3. We do allow "First name - Last initial" or "First initial - Last Name."
4. Your First and Last name must begin with a Capital Letter.
5. We do not allow company names to be your AUTHOR NAME.
6. We do not allow email addresses or URLs to be your AUTHOR NAME.
7. We do not allow adjectives or nouns or descriptors to be a part of your AUTHOR NAME.
8. You may NOT include your title after your AUTHOR NAME unless you hold a doctorate-level degree (Dr., MD, DDS, PhD, etc.)
9. We do not allow religious titles before or after your name.
10. We do not allow more than ONE account per Human. Creating multiple accounts could result in all of your accounts being removed and banned.
11. In order to include a Co-Author you must first list them as an authorized Alternate Author on your account.
12. We do not allow numbers to be included in your Author Name.
ALTERNATE AUTHOR NAME:
1. We only allow one author membership account per human but you are allowed to have alternate author names under your account (such as a pen-name or if you are an author's assistant or manage articles for multiple different author's).
2. ALL of the same rules under our AUTHOR NAME GUIDELINES above apply to the ALTERNATE AUTHOR NAMES.
3. The AUTHOR TERMS OF SERVICE applies to any ALTERNATE AUTHOR NAMES just as it does to you directly, so be sure you have written permission to submit the articles under any ALTERNATE AUTHOR NAME that you might setup.
ARTICLE BODY:
1. Must be a minimum of 250 words and no more than 5,000 words. For us, an ideal article size is 400-750 words.
2. Please do not repeat your TITLE and AUTHOR NAME at the top of the ARTICLE BODY.
3. Copyrights must be at the bottom of your article. If you put it at the top of your article, we will move it to the bottom of the article body.
4. If you include a REPRINT RIGHTS statement in your article, it must be at the BOTTOM of your article. If you put it at the top, we will move it to the bottom.
5. Keep in mind our Publisher Terms of Service when you write your reprint rights statement as we will not accept articles that have REPRINT RIGHTS statements that conflict with our posted Author Terms of Service.
6. If you sell hard in the ARTICLE BODY by including your URL or product pitch or blatant self-promotion, we will toss your article without notice. The RESOURCE BOX is where you get to pitch yourself or your website address.
7. Your article body MUST deliver on what is promised in the title. We do not accept teaser links or phrases that require a reader to click away from the article or reference another source in order to receive the full benefit of what has been promised.
8. The following HTML TAGS ARE ALLOWED in the ARTICLE BODY:
 - BOLD
 - STRONG
 - ITALICS
 - EMPHASIS
 - UNDERLINE
 - is used to force a hard line return. Use this HTML tag to prevent our system from trying to wrap your short sentences together into one paragraph.
 - <pre> and </pre> To make a text table look right.
 - <blockquote>TO INDENT A PARAGRAPH</blockquote>
 - <XMP> and </XMP> are used to display HTML code if you want to show the HTML code but not have our system interpret your code as HTML commands.
 - <OL> and <UL> tags to create a NUMBERED LIST or a BULLET POINT list. See the Essential HTML article link below for further instructions on how to implement if this is your first time using these tags. These are OPTIONAL tags as you can always just left justify a numbered list or * asterisks for bullets and it makes your article much simpler to reprint.
 HTML TAGS NOTE: Be sure to CLOSE every tag that you OPEN. Common mistakes that an author will make are to OPEN a BOLD tag and then forget to CLOSE it, causing the rest of their article to look BOLDED when they didn't intend for that.
 
 Required Reading: Essential HTML For Article Authors
9. The following HTML TAGS ARE NOT ALLOWED in the ARTICLE BODY:
 - and are not allowed anywhere in your article. To accomplish the same thing as the tag, just make sure there is one vertical space between each of your paragraphs. Our system interprets vertical spaces between paragraphs as an indication that the paragraph has ended and we insert behind-the-scenes the tags so you don't have to.
 - <JAVASCRIPT> is not allowed in any form.
 - <IMG SRC> Image tags are NOT allowed.
 - FONT SIZE changes or COLOR tags are NOT allowed.
 - <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, etc. tags are NOT allowed.
 - The <HR> horizontal line tag is NOT allowed.
 Microsoft Word Smart Quotes are NOT VALID HTML code. Do not include them in any of your HTML statements (or your article in general if you can help it).
10. Please do not submit articles with excessive HARD LINE BREAKS. A hard line break is when you use the HTML or tag to force a carriage return rather than allowing each line to wrap naturally. We may either reject or convert any articles that are sent in with hard line breaks. It's ok to force a hard line break when you're making a small list of items but it's not ok to arbitrarily force hard line returns on every single line at a certain character width.
11. We do not accept articles that use any ALLOWED HTML in the article body that is not relevant to a specific heading, subheading, or defined text.
12. At the very END of your ARTICLE BODY, please help us by removing any excess vertical spaces and do not include any HTML tags that would create or force the creation of additional vertical spaces after the end of your ARTICLE BODY.
13. Your article MUST be single spaced, MUST use appropriate paragraph breaks, and MUST use correct formatting for bulleted or numbered lists. We will not accept articles that are not single spaced, that do not use paragraphs to appropriately break up the body text, or that provide bulleted or numbered lists that are not formatted correctly.
WEBSITE LINKS/URLS There is a total limit of (6) active or inactive links allowed in the article, which consists of both the BODY and the RESOURCE BOX.
1. Maximum of (3) "Self-Serving" active or inactive links/URLs to a website that you own, control, or have an interest in.
2. Maximum of (3) active non-self serving links to a website that you do not own, control, or have an interest in which adds value to the article.
3. Confine your self-serving links to your RESOURCE BOX.
4. We do not accept articles with active or inactive links in the first 1-3 paragraphs. Please put your active links in the resource box below the article body. The article BODY is your "GIVE" and the RESOURCE BOX is your "TAKE."
5. We do not accept links that use HTML to add style attributes to the link, URL, or text link description.
6. We do not accept links formatted with Smart Quotes by using MS WORD.
7. We will auto format valid URLs included in your RESOURCE BOX.
  
  Example of an invalid URL:
  
  Your-Company-Name.com
  
  www.your-company-name.com
  
  Example of a valid URL:
  
  http://Your-Company-Name.com/
8. We will NOT auto-format URLs that are included in the BODY of your article.
9. Your links MAY NOT contain a file to be downloaded of any type.
10. We do not knowingly allow any URLs in any of our articles that are banned by Google or if your website engages in questionable SEO practices -- we may reject your articles.
11. We do not accept articles that have the same ACTIVE link more than once. Do not submit duplicate URLs.
12. We do not allow articles which have strategic keyword anchor text links in the body to your domain that do not add informational value to the article. Any use of anchored text links to websites that you own should add value to the article topic rather than stand out as an obvious abuse an anchored text link. The goal with this policy is to be a good net citizen by only allowing articles that add value with the anchored text links rather than for pure SEO reasons.
  
  Example: Within your article, you link the word "bird dog" to an article that you wrote about bird dogging. This is a good example of an anchored text link vs. linking the same text to your home page as it doesn't really add value.
13. If you put all 3 of the active self serving links that we allow in the body of your article, we will reject it.
14. We will not accept articles with links (in the Article Body or Resource Box) to adult-oriented websites, including but not limited to websites that include pornography, adult-oriented sexual content.
15. We do not allow links to websites that are under construction. Websites must be active and have content in order for you to link to them from your article. We will reject your article if it contains a link of this nature.
EMAIL 'MAILTO:' LINKS: We highly recommend including a link to your website but do not advocate including a mailto: or email link to your personal or work email account. Spammers will abuse it. It's better to include a valid website URL and let potential customers find your email address on your website.
KEYWORDS: Adding the top keywords related to your article helps us to bring more traffic to your article.
1. Please make sure you put a comma between each KEYWORD.
2. Ideally, your keywords should be optimized based on the most commonly searched keywords as published by Overture.com for your particular niche. It helps to use a good keyword research tool to help you determine which ones are best to use.
3. You should have a minimum of 4-5 keywords and a maximum of 25.
4. We do not accept keywords that are completely unrelated to the content of your article.
SUMMARY: The purpose of the ARTICLE SUMMARY is to give an abstract or summary of the benefits that your article delivers.
1. Every article must have a 2-5 sentence article summary and not exceed 200 words. If you don't know what to put in your summary, just use the first paragraph of your article.
2. We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
3. We do not allow blatant self-promotion in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
4. We do not allow your AUTHOR NAME to be in your ARTICLE SUMMARY.
5. We do not allow any website URL or Email Address to be in your ARTICLE SUMMARY
CATEGORY:
1. ARTICLE CATEGORY or SUB-CATEGORY: Please choose the best category or sub category based on the theme of your article and not the theme of your business. Here are some general hints on how to select the best category for categories that are often confused.
2. Home based business articles are only allowed in the Home Based Business category. We do not want to see home based business articles in the BUSINESS category or sub-categories.
3. Internet business related articles MUST be under the "Internet & Businesses Online" category or sub-categories. We do not want to see Internet articles under the BUSINESS category or sub-categories.
4. MLM or Network Marketing articles can only go under the Home Based Business category.
5. We do not accept Home Based Business articles in the Entrepreneurialism sub-category of Business.
6. Internet Joint Venture articles should go under Affiliate-Revenue in the Internet & Online Business category.
7. Articles on Nutrition should not go in the Weight Loss sub-category, but rather should be in the Nutrition sub-category. Supplement articles should not go in the Nutrition category but rather should be in the Supplements sub-category.
8. The Coaching sub-category of Self-Improvement is designed for articles about "how to be a coach" rather than articles about coaching a person on a particular topic.
9. Click here to view our Category Guidelines To Help You Select The Perfect Category For Your Article Submissions

EzineArticles.com Editorial Guidelines: (AFFILIATE PROGRAMS):

Affiliate links will be allowed if the link is a domain name you own which forward/redirects to the affiliate link from the top-level of the domain name. For example, it is permissible to forward to an affiliate link from:

http://your-company-name.com/

...but it would not be permissible to forward to an affiliate link from:

http://your-company-name.com/page.html
http://your-company-name.com/subdirectory/
http://your-company-name.com/subdirectory/page.html
http://sub-domain.your-company-name.com/

Any article with an affiliate link that does not adhere to this guideline will cause the article to be rejected.

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