Done Correctly And Submitting Articles Will Get Your Site On The First Page Of The Search Engines

By Author: Donald Saunders
Total Articles: 84
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The aim for the majority of website owners is to get a flow of free traffic and that means getting your website listed on the first page of the natural search results for the major search engines, including the big three of Yahoo, Google and MSN.

Some years ago that was not too herd even in quite competitive markets however now it has become very much harder as the Internet has grown rapidly and the search engines are now very much more sophisticated in their assessment of website and their determination of just which websites should be given prominence in their listings.

SEO is a complicated business today and whole books have been written on the subject. One thing, however, which virtually all of the experts agree on 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 then submitting these to a range of article directories. But, there is a right way and a wrong way of doing this.

Your starting point is to write a series of articles on a variety of topics related to your website, with each article being accompanied ...
... by an 'about the author' box which provides anchor text 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 do not intend to look at this particular subject. Our attention here is focused upon how you submit your articles to the article directory sites.

Here opinions are mixed and, as with many things in the world of search engine optimization, you will be well advised to try various different approaches and to carefully document what you do and the results you get. Once you have gathered sufficient statistics you will discover that it is a relatively simple thing to see precisely what works and what does not. An alternative is just to listen to what other people are saying 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 knowledge and are just trying to sell you something or from individuals who would deliberately mislead you because they view you as their competition.

The first route is to submit your articles by hand. With many hundreds of article directories at your disposal this is not a workable route, unless you are going to restrict yourself to submitting to only the major, established and highly trafficked article directories. This is certainly possible and there are many people who feel that this is the best route because they would argue that most article directories have little if any 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 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 number of submission services available, but only a handful will provide you with a satisfactory service and leave you confident that your articles has been submitted to a specific list of sites within a reasonable time frame. The problem with submission services is that you have to commit yourself to an ongoing monthly or annual payment and they are very expensive.

TurningWhen it comes to article submission software, there are again several choices open to you from the quite expensive to the extremely reasonable. If you feel that this is a route which appeals to you then you need to check out various options and should look carefully at precisely what each product can and cannot do. For instance, does the software fully automate or semi-automate the submission process? How many article directories will the software submit to? Can you add your own article directories to the software? Does the software provide you with a submission record so that you can see at a glance 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 produce a series of 'unique' articles from your original article so that each directory gets a different version of your article? Many people will tell you that it does not matter and that the current debate over duplicate content is overblown. Other people however will tell you that, although it may not appear to be important in the short run, in the longer run the search engines will discount a lot of your article links as they find that they are from identical articles. Again the answer is to test for yourself and see just what results you get.

If you do feel that creating unique articles is the best 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. Most software programs are extremely fast and easy to operate, but also produce absolute rubbish! However, there are a few software programs available which, although they do require a little more work, produce some very good results. There are also some software programs which will not simply create unique articles but also 'package' them ready for importing into some of the article submission programs.

There is no doubt that submitting articles does work when it comes to building links to your website and will certainly bring you free search engine traffic. However, you do need to setup an article submission process which suits your budget and work routine and that means testing the system until you achieve the results you want.