It's well known that article directory submissions are a great way to promote your site. But most people aren't taking full advantage of this powerful promotional strategy. One of the best ways to use articles to increase traffic to your site and move your page rank up is to fully optimize them. Below are some tips that I use to achieve success online when writing articles.

1. Don't just write an article and send it out blindly and hope that you will gain good results from it. Would you take out a shotgun, close your eyes and hope that one of the pellets hits something worthwhile during hunting season?

Watch your articles. Monitoring what happens with them, you may notice that some topics seem more popular than others. This is useful information. Once you know what people like, write more articles on that topic.

2. Track the content web sites that give you the most traffic, you can do this by logging into your web site control panel and check which URLs are sending the most traffic through your articles.

Take notes of the top 5-8 directories. Keep it in mind to send in good quality, informative articles to them on a regular basis for publishing. That way you should be able to use these web sites to drive traffic to your web site up a notch or two.

3. Another often overlooked way to promote your site and increase traffic, is to look at your statistics and find out what keywords are being used the most to find your site. Research these keywords and find out where you rank in the search engines for them. If you are not in the top 10 results then write another article about the topic. To optimize your article even further, try creating your own keyword anchor text links in the resource box that back link to the page that you want to show up in the results.

For example, if you have a web site called "yoursite.com" and your keyword is 'baby skirt', you can create your resource box as "yoursite.com/babyskirt". This will be beneficial because of the increased incoming links to the page will give it a higher ranking and potentially put your article in the top 10 for that term, leading to even more traffic to your site.

Web site tracking is one of the most important components for monitoring your web site. Ultimately, by using tracking to your advantage, you can make your site a success. The same applies to article marketing. Optimize your articles and you will benefit from the results greatly.