These editorial guidelines are designed to help you understand what is acceptable and unacceptable for inclusion in the SEO Fundamentals article database.

1. Your Article:

a) Must be an original article, written by you. If you work for an author as an employee or contractor and are submitting the article, submit the article using the name of the original author, including his or her email address.

b) Must not be an article taken from the public domain or purchased. If you hired a ghost writer to write your articles, you must have an eclusive license that allows only your name to be associated with the articles produced for you. Don't submit articles drawn from article packs with non-exclusive licenses. We'll reject those articles. We do not want more than one copy of any article in our directory.

c) Must be informative and share your unique expertise. Include tips, strategies, techniques, case-studies, analysis, opinions and commentary in your articles.

d) Must not be a press release, advertisement, sales letter, promotional copy, or blatant and excessive self-promotion or hype.

e) Must use proper English, spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure. Your article must be proofed and double checked for accuracy. If English is your second language -- have it proofed by someone who has English as their native tongue before submitting your article.

f) Simple punctuation rules:

• One or two spaces after each period, colon, or semi-colon.
• Periods should be inside of quotes.
• When using ellipses (...), 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.

g) 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 excess profanity.

h) 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.

i) Must not contain information that promotes unethical practices such as: Term papers or essays for sale to college students, PLR (Private Label Rights) articles as a good thing, the promotion of email Safe-Lists as a good thing or bulk email spamming as a good thing, advocacy for paid auto-surf programs as a good thing, advocacy of click fraud or clicking on Adsense ads as a good thing, or advocacy of Adsense Arbitrage (this policy is created to protect our advertisers interests).

j) Must not contain any content that is a violation of any law, be considered defamatory, libelous, or infringes on the legal rights of others.

k) Must not be a submission of the exact same article as one which you've already submitted. Some authors have submitted the same article multiple times with only a few words changed in the body -- we will reject these and will ban authors who engage in this practice.

l) Must not be keyword stuffed with excessive keywords or key phrases that are repeated and/or bolded too many times in your articles.

2. SEO Fundamentals Editorial Guidelines: (FORMAT)

a) Title: Your Title MustBe In Upper and Lower Case Letters With The First Letter of Each Major Word Capitalized.

• If you submit your Title in all Caps, we will change to "Upper and Lower Caps."
• It's okay not to capitalize common words such as "a" - "the" - "to" - "for" etc. unless you want to.
• Please do not put quotes around your entire Title.
• Do not end your Title with a period.
• 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.
• Refrain from excessive repetitive punctuation in your Title. One exclamation mark (!) or question mark (?) is enough to make a point.
• HTML tags of any kind are note allowed in your Title.
• Spaces before you begin your Title are not allowed.
• We do not allow your author name or any website URL in your Title.
• Please do not repeat your Title in the body of your article.
• Your Title must not be keyword stuffed (redundant keywords used over and over again), but rather should read as a natural language Title.

b) 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.

c) Your Full Author Name: You must include your first and last name as the author of the article.

• "First name - Last initial" or "First initial - Last Name" are allowed.
• Two initials for your author name are not allowed.
• Your First and Last name must begin with a Capital Letter.
• Company names are not allowed as your author name.
• Email addresses are not allowed as your author name.
• Adjectives or nouns or descriptors are not allowed as your author name or as part of your author name.
• Do not include your title after your author name unless you hold a doctorate-level degree (Dr., MD, DDS, PhD, etc.)
• Religious titles are not allowed before or after your name.
• We do not allow more than one author name to have an account. If your article was co-authored, then please put the co-author's name in the Resource Box and we will manually add them as a Co-Author to your article byline.

d) Alternate Author Names: 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).

• ALL of the same rules for the Full Author Name above apply to the Alternate Author Names.
• The Author Terms of Service applys 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.
• Do not setup an alternate author name of the guru of an affiliate program that you want to promote.
• You can add alternate author names from your Members Profile once you are logged in to the members only area.

e) Article Body: Must be a minimum of 250 words and no more than 3,500 words. An ideal article size is 400-750 words.

• Do not repeat your Title and Author Name at the top of the article body. They will be removed.
• Copyrights must be at the bottom of your article. If you put it at the top of your article, it will be moved to the bottom of the article body.
• If you include a Reprint Rights statement in your article, it must be at the bottom of your article. 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.
• 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.

The following HTML tags are allowed in the Article Body:

• Bold
• Italics
• Underline
• < br > 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.
• < blockquote >To Indent A Paragraph
• < OL > and < UL > tags to create a Numbered List or a Bullet Point list.

The following HTML tags are not allowed in the Article Body:

• < p > and < /p >are not allowed anywhere in your article. To accomplish the same thing as the < p > 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.
• < 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.

e) Website Active Links / Your URL: You are allowed a maximum of 2 Self-Serving Links/URLs, active or inactive, in your article. A Self-Serving Link/URL is a link/URL to a website that you own, control or have an interest in. Whenever possible, try to confine your self-serving links to your Resource Box.

• We don't accept articles with active or inactive links in the first sentence, first 1-3 paragraphs or above the fold of an article. Please put your active links in the resource box below the article body.
• You can use HTML code to make your link active but be sure to not include font attributes or break tags (
  ) in your HREF statements.
• Double check your active links before submitting to be sure they work. Your article will be rejected if your website links do not work.
• We do auto format valid URLs that are in your Resource Box.
• We do not auto-format URLs that are in the Body of your article.
• Your links may not contain a file to be downloaded of any type.
• 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.
• We do not accept articles that have the same activelink more than once.
• 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. If you put all 3 of the active self serving links that we allow in the body of your article, we will reject it. 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.
• 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.
• We 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.

e) Adding Keywords: Adding the top keywords related to your article helps us to bring more traffic to your article.

• Please make sure you put a comma between each Keyword.
• Ideally, your keywords should be optimized based on the most commonly searched keywords for your particular niche. You should have a minimum of 4-5 keywords and a maximum of 25. We do not accept keywords that are completely unrelated to the content of your article.

f) Article Summary: Every article must have a 2-5 sentence article summary and not exceed 200 words. The purpose of the Article Summary is to give an abstract or summary of the benefits that your article delivers.

• If you don't know what to put in your summary, just use the first paragraph of your article.
• We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your Article Summary.
• We do not allow blatant self-promotion in your Article Summary.
• We do not allow your Author Name to be in your Article Summary.
• We do not allow any website URL or Email Address to be in your Article Summary.

g) 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.

3. SEO Fundamentals Editorial Guidelines: (AFFILIATE PROGRAMS)

Affiliate links are allowed if the link is included in the Resource Box. Affiliate links will not be allowed within the Body of your article.