Writing and submitting articles to the article directories is a great way of getting your site noticed by the search engines. However, it is vital that do not just rush in and that you think hard about how best to do this.
The goal for the majority of website owners is to achieve a flow of free traffic and that means having your website displayed on the first page of the natural search results for the major search engines, including the big three of Google, MSN and Yahoo.
A few years ago this was not too difficult even in competitive markets however today it has become much more difficult as the Internet has grown rapidly and the search engines have become much more sophisticated in their assessment of website and their determination of just which websites should be given prominence in their listings.
Search engine optimization is a complex business nowadays and whole books have been, and are still being, written on this subject. However, one thing that almost all of the experts agree about is the importance of steadily and slowly building links to your website 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 right way and a wrong way of doing this.
Your starting point is to write a series of articles focusing on various topics related to the theme of your website, with every article being accompanied by a resource box that provides links back to your website. In this short article we will assume that you are familiar with the ins and outs of article writing and are not going to look at this particular subject. Our attention here is focused upon how to submit your articles to the article directories.
There are a variety of opinions here and, as with many things in the world of search engine optimization, you would be well advised to try out various different approaches and carefully document what you do and the results you get. Then, once you have accumulated enough data you will discover that it is a reasonably simple matter to see precisely what works and what does not. The alternative approach is just to listen to what other people are saying on the subject but 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 just trying to sell you something or from people who would deliberately mislead you because they view you as a possible competitor.
Your first option is to submit your articles by hand. With many hundreds of article directories at your disposal this really is not a sensible option, unless you are going to limit yourself to submitting to only the major, well established and highly trafficked article directories. This is possible and there are many people who feel that this is the best option as they argue that most article directories 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 a great deal to get your articles picked up and distributed to other websites.
Your second option is to submit your articles to a large number of article directories which means either making use of a submission service or some form of article submission software.
There are various submission services, but only a handful will provide you with a good service and give you the confidence that your articles will be submitted to a specific list of sites within a reasonable period of time. The problem with submission services is that they require you to commit yourself to an ongoing monthly payment and they are often extremely expensive.
TurningWhen it comes to article submission software, there are again a variety of choices available from the very costly to the extremely affordable. If this is an option that appeals to you then you need to check out a number of options and should look carefully at precisely what each product will and will not do. For example, does the software semi-automate or fully automate the submission process? How many article directories will the software submit to? Can you add your own list of article directories to the software? Does the software provide you with a submission log so that you can see easily just how successful every article submission has been?
One final consideration is whether you should submit the same article to the article directories, or should create a series 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 really does not matter and that the current debate over duplicate content is considerably overblown. Others however will say that, although it may not seem to be important in the short run, in the longer term the search engines will discount a lot of your article links as they find them to be from identical articles. Once again the secret is to test for yourself and see just what sort of results you get.
If you do decide that submitting unique articles is the right route to follow then you will need to investigate the wide range of article rewriting software available. Once again take your time and examine each program carefully. The vast majority of programs are very fast and easy to use, but also produce absolute rubbish! There are however a few programs available that, despite the fact that they do take a little more work, create some excellent results. You can also get some programs that will not simply produce unique articles but also output them for importing into various article submission programs.
Submitting articles really does work in terms of building links for your website and will bring you free search engine traffic. You do however need to setup an article submission process that suits your work routine and budget and this means testing and tweaking the system until you get the results you want.
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