Once you have your own website, a large percentage of your waking hours will be spent thinking about how you can market the site and drive more traffic to it. An incredibly powerful tool you will want to learn is how to effectively advertise your website on an article directory. But there are thousands of article directories out there, so how do you know which ones to choose? You want to choose the best article directories in order to generate the highest quality backlinks.



First, you need to understand how article submission can help you to generate quality backlinks. Remember, the important word here is ‘quality.' You want to create backlinks that lead from a web page that has good information related to the topic that you cover and directs the reader to your own website. If you simply post links everywhere on any site you can, the search engines will consider those backlinks of very poor quality and will either ignore them or count them against your ranking.

Instead, you want to choose your article directory carefully, and then craft keyword rich, relevant articles for submission to the directory. You include a link at the bottom of the article that leads readers to more information on your site. Doing so means you are certain that you are generating quality backlinks that will help boost your rankings.

So why not plan article submissions for every article directory out there? Because the search engines will see this as a form of spam. It's better to submit more articles to the quality, top-ranked sites and a few niche sites than to blanket the web with article submissions to every article directory you can find.

In order for your articles with the backlinks to be seen by the traffic you are targeting, you need to submit to article directories that get the most visitors. The best thing to do is choose the top article directories based on two criteria: the Google Page Rank (PR) of a site, and the site's Alexa ranking, an indicator of the traffic that a site gets. By choosing an article directory that ranks well on both Google' s page ranks and on Alexa, you have a better chance of getting targeted traffic to your articles who will then click on your quality backlinks.

The top five article directories for article submission are listed below. A PR of 10 or lower is high, while an Alexa ranking of 1 would be the highest.

1. Ezinearticles.com, with a Google PR of 6 and an Alexa Ranking of 197

2. GoArticles.com, with a Google PR of 6 and an Alexa Ranking of 4337

3. Selfgrowth.com, with a Google PR of 6 and an Alexa Ranking of 8095

4. Isnare.com , with a Google PR of 6 and an Alexa Ranking of 8791

5. Buzzle.com, with a Google PR of 5 and an Alexa Ranking of 1918

These rankings fluctuate all the time, but these five are steadily the top directories for article submission. You can also choose several niche directories with articles that focus on the same topic as your website. Posting your articles here would still be driving targeted traffic to you through quality backlinks, since you're linking to pages with related content.