The goal for the majority of site owners is to achieve a steady flow of free traffic and that means getting your site listed on the first page of the natural search results for the main search engines, including the big three of Google, Yahoo and MSN.
A few years ago that was relatively easy even in competitive markets however nowadays it has become very much more difficult as the Internet has grown dramatically and the search engines have become much more sophisticated in their assessment of site and their determination of just which sites ought to be given high.
Search engine optimization is a complicated business nowadays and entire books have been written on this subject. One thing, however, which virtually all of the experts agree on is the importance of slowly and steadily building links to your site and one of the best ways to do this is by writing articles and then submitting these to a range of article directory sites. But, there is a right way and a wrong way to do this.
Your starting point is to write a series of articles on various topics related to the theme of your site, with every 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 article writing and are not going to look at this particular subject. In this article we are going to focus upon how to submit your articles to the article directory sites.
Opinions are mixed here and, as with anything else in the world of SEO, you would be well advised to try out various approaches and to carefully document both what you do and the results you get. Once you have gathered enough statistics you will find that it is a quite simple thing to see just what works and what does not work. An alternative is just to listen to what others are saying on the subject although the problem here is that there is a great deal of misinformation around either from people who have little if any real experience and are just trying to sell you something or from people who want to deliberately mislead you because they view you as their competition.
The first route is to submit your articles by hand. With literally hundreds of article directories at your disposal this is not a viable route, unless you limit yourself to submitting to only the main, well established and highly trafficked article directories. This is possible and indeed there are a lot of people who feel that this is the best route because they argue that the vast majority of article directories have little standing in the eyes of the search engines and so few visitors that they are not going to attract traffic to your articles and not do a great deal to get your articles picked up and distributed to other websites.
The second route is to submit your articles to a large number of article directories which means using a submission service or some form of article submission software.
There are a variety of submission services available, however, only a handful will provide you with a satisfactory service and leave you confident that your articles has been submitted to a specified list of directory sites within a reasonable period of time. The problem with these services is that you have to commit yourself to an ongoing monthly or annual payment and they are often extremely expensive.
TurningWhen it comes to article submission software, there are once again various choices available from the quite costly to the extremely reasonable. If this is a route which appeals to you then you need to check out various options and to look carefully at just what each product will and will not do. For instance, does the software semi-automate or fully automate the submission process How many article directories will the program submit to Are you able to add your own article directories to the submission process Are you provided with a submission log so that you can see at a glance how successful every article submission has been
One final consideration is whether you ought to submit the same article to the article directory sites, or ought to create a number of 'unique' articles from your base article so that every directory gets a different version of your article A lot of people will say that it does not matter and that the current debate over duplicate content is considerably overblown. Other people however will say that, although it might not seem to be important in the short term, in the longer term the search engines will discount many of your article links as they find that they are from identical articles. Once again the answer is to test for yourself and see just what results you get.
If you do decide that submitting unique articles is the right way to go then you should investigate the wide range of article rewriting software available. Again take the time to look at each program very carefully. Most software programs are extremely fast and easy to operate, but also create what are obviously 'machine' written articles. However, there are a few software programs which, despite the fact that they do require a little more work, produce some very good results. There are also some software programs which will not just produce unique articles but also output them for importing into various article submission programs.
Submitting articles does work in terms of building links for your site and will bring you free search engine traffic. You do however need to setup a submission process which fits in with your budget and work routine and that means testing the system until you achieve the results you want.
http://www.articleco.com/Article/Done-Right-And-Submitting-Articles-Will-Get-Your-Website-Onto-Page-One-Of-The-Search-Engine-Results/55585
