Editorial Guidelines for Submitting To Injury-Settlement-Guide.com

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

Editorial Guidelines: CONTENT QUALIFICATIONS

To Be Qualified For Our Site, Your Article:

• Must be an original article that you wrote.
  
  
• Must not be an article from the public domain or bought. If you did hire a ghostwriter to write your articles, you MUST have an EXCLUSIVE LICENSE that *only* allows your name to be associated with the articles produced for you.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• 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 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. **If you're submitting your article to multiple websites, we STRONGLY suggest you re-write it for each separate submission. Search engines frown on duplicate content and changing your article's wording insures each submission is unique.
  
  
• 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.
  
  

Editorial Guidelines: FORMAT

ARTICLE TITLE:

• Your Title MUST Be In Upper and Lower Case Letters With The First Letter of Each Major Word Capitalized.
  
• We will not accept your TITLE in all CAPS.
  
• It is not required that you capitalize common words such as "a" - "the" - "to" - "for" etc, we accept these either way.
  
• We do not accept QUOTES around your entire TITLE.
  
• Do NOT end your TITLE with a period.
  
• Refrain from excessive repetitive punctuation in your TITLE. One exclamation "!" or question mark "?" is enough to make a point.
  
• We do not allow HTML tags of any kind in your TITLE.
  
• Your TITLE must begin with the first word flush to the LEFT of the TITLE submission box.
  
• We do not allow your AUTHOR NAME or any WEBSITE URL to be in your TITLE.
  
• 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.
  
• We do not accept One Word as the article TITLE, a MINIMUM of two unique words is required.
  
• We do not accept articles that use slang terms or profanity in the TITLE.
  
• We do not accept articles that do not deliver on the article title. You must deliver in the article body on the promises made in the article 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 from the search engines...so choose the first 3-4 words wisely.

Example of a Bad Keyword TITLE:

Top 7 Qualities to Look for in a Personal Injury Lawyer

Example of a Good Keyword TITLE:

Personal Injury Lawyers - Top 7 Qualities to Look for BEFORE Hiring Yours

Recommended Reading: Article Marketing & Copywriting Secret: How To Make Your Article TITLE Sell

• Your First and Last name must begin with a Capital Letter.
  
• We do not allow company names to be your AUTHOR NAME.
  
• We do not allow email addresses or URLs to be your AUTHOR NAME.
  
• We do not allow adjectives or nouns or descriptors to be a part of your AUTHOR NAME.
  
• We do not allow numbers to be included in your Author Name.
  
  

• Must be a minimum of 250 words and no more than 2,000 words. For us, an ideal article size is 400-750 words.
• Please do not repeat your TITLE and AUTHOR NAME at the top of the ARTICLE BODY.
• 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.
• 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.
• If you sell hard in the ARTICLE BODY by including your URL or 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.
• 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.
  
• HTML TAGS ARE NOT ALLOWED in the ARTICLE BODY. You may use brackets around a word or phrase to make it appear bold. For example, [Case History] would appear as Case History when your article is listed on our site.
  
• Your article MUST be single spaced and MUST use appropriate paragraph breaks.
  
  

WEBSITE LINKS/URLS: There is a total limit of (2) inactive links allowed in the article, which consists of both the BODY and the RESOURCE BOX. We will make your links active when the page goes live.

• Confine your self-serving links to your RESOURCE BOX.
  
• 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."
  
• 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 ACTIVE link more than once. Do not submit duplicate URLs.
  
• 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.
  
  

RESOURCE BOX: Include your resource box information immediately following your article. This is the "author bio" that is below your article body and it's also known as your "SIG" (short for SIGnature).

Here are the essential items to include in your RESOURCE BOX:

• Your Name: Your name and optional title should be the first thing in your resource box.
  
• Your Website Address: in valid URL form. Example: http://Your-Company-Name.com
  
• Your Elevator Pitch: This is 1 to 3 sentences that encapsulates the essence of what makes you, your firm and your offering unique.
  
• Your Call To Action: You've got them interested and now it's time to lead them to contact you or visit your website. Best to only give (1) specific call to action.
  
• Be sure to include your name, website address, your firm's unique benefits (as briefly as possible) and a simple call to action.
  
  

• A listing of every website you own. Only post one URL that is related to the topic of your article.
• A listing of every accomplishment you've achieved to date. Keep your resource box brief and to the point. Yes, your resource box should be benefit-oriented so that the reader finds value in reading it, rather than your ego being justified.
• Advertisements or pitches for products or services that are not relevant to the topic of your article.
• Keep the size of your resource box no larger than 15% of your total article size. Too often we see resource boxes that are 50% of the size of the total article and this is abusive.
  
  

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 clients find your email address on your website.

*Editorial guidelines based on those given by EzineArticles.com