The aim for most site owners is to achieve a flow of free traffic and that means having your site displayed on the first page of the natural search results for the major search engines, including the big three of MSN, Yahoo and Google. Some years ago this was reasonably easy even in competitive markets but today it has become much harder as the Internet has grown rapidly and the search engines have become very much more sophisticated in their assessment of site and their determination of just which sites should be given high.
SEO is a complicated business today and entire books have been written on the subject. One thing, however, which almost all of the experts agree upon is the importance of slowly and steadily gaining links to your site and one of the most effective ways to do this is by writing articles and then submitting these to a range of article directory sites. But, there is a correct way and a wrong way of doing this.
The starting point is to write several articles focusing on various topics related to your site, with each article being accompanied by a resource box which provides links back to your site. In this short article we are going to assume that you are familiar with the ins and outs of article writing and so we do not intend to look at this particular subject. Here, our attention is focused upon how you go about submitting your articles to the article directory sites.
Here opinions are mixed and, as with most things in the world of search engine optimization, you would be well advised to try out various approaches and carefully document both what you do and the results you get. Once you have gathered sufficient data you will discover that it is a reasonably simple matter to see just what works and what does not work. An alternative approach is just to listen to what other people have to say on the subject although the difficulty here is that there is a mass of misinformation floating around either from individuals who have little or no real experience and are just trying to sell you something or from individuals who wish to deliberately mislead you because they see you as a possible competitor.
The first route is to submit your articles by hand. With literally hundreds of article directory sites at your disposal this is not a viable route, unless you are going to limit yourself to submitting only to the major, established and highly trafficked article directories. This is certainly possible and there are many people who believe that this is the best route because they would argue that the majority of article directory sites have little if any standing in the eyes of the search engines and so few visitors that they will attract little traffic to your articles and not do much to get your articles picked up and distributed by other webmasters.
The second route is to submit your articles to a large number of article directories which means either using a submission service or some type of article submission software.
There are several submission services available, however, only a handful will provide you with a good service and give you the confidence that your articles will be submitted to a specified list of directory sites within a reasonable time frame. The problem with submission services is that you have to commit yourself to a monthly or annual payment and they are often extremely expensive.
TurningWhen it comes to article submission software, there are again many choices available from the quite expensive to the extremely reasonable. If this is a route which appeals to you then you need to check out a number of options and should look carefully at just what each product can and cannot do. For instance, does the software fully automate or semi-automate the submission process? How many article directory sites can the software submit to? Can you add your own list of article directories to the program? Are you provided with a submission log so that you are able to see easily how successful each article submission has been?
One final consideration is whether you should submit the same article to the article directory sites, or should create a number of 'unique' articles from your original article so that each directory gets a different version of your article? A lot of people will say that it does not matter and that the present debate over duplicate content is overblown. Other people however will say that, while it may not seem to be important in the short run, in the longer term the search engines will discount many of your article links as they find them to be from identical articles. Again the answer here is to test for yourself and see just what results you get.
Should you decide that creating unique articles is the best route to follow then you should investigate the range of article rewriting software available. Once more take the time to look at each program carefully. The vast majority of programs are extremely fast and easy to use, but also produce absolute rubbish! There are however some programs available which, although they do take a little more work, create some very good results. There are also some programs which will not simply produce unique articles but also 'package' them ready for import into some of the article submission programs.
Submitting articles does work in terms of building links for your site and will certainly bring in free search engine traffic. You do however need to setup a submission process which suits your budget and work routine and this means testing and tweaking the system until you get the results you want. WebMarketingCentre.com provides information on article writing and article submission and is also an article directory where you can pick up a free online article for your website or ezine and to which you can submit articles on a wide variety of topics including fitness health and exercise articles and much more.
