Done Correctly And Submitting Articles Can Get Your Website Onto Page One Of The Search Engine Results - By: Don Saunders

The prize for most site owners is to achieve a flow of free traffic and that means having your site displayed on page one of the natural search results for the main search engines, including the big three of Yahoo, MSN and Google.

Some years ago this was quite easy even in competitive markets however today it has become much more difficult as the Internet has grown rapidly and the search engines have become far more sophisticated at assessing sites and determining just which sites ought to be given high.

Search engine optimization is a complicated business nowadays and entire books have been, and are still being, written on this subject. However, one thing that almost all of the experts agree upon is the importance of slowly and steadily building links to your site and one of the most effective ways to do this is by writing articles and then submitting these to a variety of article directories. However, there is a correct way and a wrong way of doing this.

The starting point is to write a number of articles focusing on a variety of topics related to your site, with each article being accompanied by an 'about the author' box that provides anchor text links back to your site. 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. In this article we are going to focus upon how you go about submitting your articles to the article directories.

Here opinions are mixed and, as with anything else in the world of SEO, you would be well advised to try out various different approaches and carefully document both what you do and the results you get. Once you have accumulated sufficient data you will find that it is a quite simple thing to see just what works and what does not. The alternative is just to listen to what other people have to say on the subject although the difficulty 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 their competition.

Your first route is to hand submit your articles. With many hundreds of article directory sites to choose from this really is not a sensible route, unless you limit yourself to submitting only to the main, established and high traffic article directories. This is certainly possible and there are a lot of people who feel that this is the best route as they argue that most article directory sites have little standing in the eyes of the search engines and so few visitors that they will attract little traffic to your articles and not do a great deal to get your articles picked up and distributed to other websites.

Your second route is to submit your articles to a large number of article directories which means either using a submission service or some sort of article submission software.

There are a number of submission services, however, 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 problem with these services is that you have to commit yourself to a monthly payment and they are very expensive.

TurningWhen it comes to article submission software, there are once again various choices open to you from the very costly to the extremely affordable. If this is an option that appeals to you then you should check out various options and should look carefully at just what each product will and will not do. For instance, does the software fully automate or semi-automate the process? How many article directory sites can the program submit to? Are you able to add your own article directories to the program? Are you provided with a submission record so that you are able to see quickly just how successful each article submission has been?

A final consideration is whether you ought to submit the same article to the article directories, or ought to produce a number of 'unique' articles from your base article so that each directory gets a different version of your article? Many people will say that it really does not matter and that the present debate about duplicate content is considerably overblown. Others however will say that, while it may not seem to be important in the short term, 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.

Should you decide that using 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 carefully. The vast majority of programs are extremely fast and easy to use, but also create very poor quality articles. There are however some programs that, although they take a bit more work on your part, produce some first class results. You can also get some programs that will not simply generate unique articles but also 'package' them for importing directly into various article submission programs.

There is no doubt that submitting articles really does work when it comes to building links for your site and will certainly bring you free search engine traffic. You do however need to setup an article submission process that fits in with your budget and work routine and this means testing the system until you achieve the results you want.

About the Author

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 economic articles and much more.

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Don-Saunders/17211

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