The goal for all site operators is to get a flow of free traffic and that means getting your site displayed on page one of the natural search results for the main search engines, including the big three of MSN, Google and Yahoo. Some years ago that was not too herd even in competitive markets however nowadays it has become very much more difficult as the Internet has grown rapidly and the search engines have become much more sophisticated at assessing sites and determining just which sites should be given prominence in their listings. SEO is a complicated business nowadays and entire books have been, and are still being, written on this subject. However, one thing which virtually all of the experts agree about is the importance of steadily and slowly gaining links to your site and one of the most effective ways to do this is by writing articles and submitting these to a variety of article directories. However, there is a correct way and a wrong way to do this. Your starting point is to write several articles focusing on a variety of topics related to your site, with every article being accompanied by a resource box which provides anchor text links back to your site. In this brief article we are going to assume that you are familiar with the ins and outs of article writing and do not intend to look at this particular subject. Here, our attention is focused upon how to submit your articles to the article directories. There are a variety of opinions here and, as with anything else in the world of search engine optimization, you would be well advised to try various approaches and to carefully document what you do and the results you get. Then, once you have gathered sufficient data you will discover that it is a reasonably simple thing to see precisely what works and what does not. The alternative approach is simply to listen to what others have to say on the subject although the problem here is that there is a great deal of misinformation floating around either from those who have little or no real knowledge and are simply trying to sell you something or from individuals who want to deliberately mislead you because they see you as their competition. The first route is to submit your articles by hand. With literally hundreds of article directory sites to choose from this really is not a viable route, unless you limit yourself to submitting only to the main, established and high traffic article directories. This is possible and there are a lot of people who feel that this is the best route because they argue that most article directory sites have little if any standing as far as the search engines are concerned and so few visitors that they are not going to attract 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 making use of a submission service or some form of article submission software. There are a variety of submission services, but only a handful will provide you with a satisfactory service and leave you happy that your articles will be submitted to a specified list of directory sites within a reasonable time frame. The main drawback to submission services is that they require you 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 again various choices open to you from the quite costly to the extremely reasonable. If you feel that this is an option which appeals to you then you need to check out various options and to look carefully at precisely what each product will and will not do. For instance, does the software fully automate or semi-automate the submission process? How many article directory sites can you submit to? Are you able to add your own article directories to the submission process? Does the software provide you with a submission record so that you are able to see at a glance how successful every article submission has been? A final consideration is whether you should submit the same article to the article directories, or should produce a series of ‘unique’ articles from your original article so that every directory gets a different version of your article? A lot of people will tell you that it really does not matter and that the present debate about duplicate content is considerably overblown. Others however will tell you that, although it may not appear to be important in the short term, in the longer run 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. If you do feel that creating unique articles is the right way to go then you will need to investigate the range of article rewriting software available. Once again take the time to look at each program very carefully. The vast majority of software programs are very fast and simple to use, but also generate very poor quality articles. However, there are some software programs which, despite the fact that they take a little more work, create some first class results. You can also get some software programs which will not only create unique articles but also output them for importing into various article submission programs. Submitting articles really does work in terms of building links to your site and will bring in free search engine traffic. You do however have to setup an article submission process which suits your budget and work routine and that means testing and tweaking the system until you achieve 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. Tags: article, article directory, article submission, Article Writing, submit articles, write articles Related PostsPost a comment
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