Having your website rank at the top of the search engines will provide you with a stream of traffic ready to read, buy or interact with your site. Getting this high first page ranking in the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN is extremely difficult and not to mention, time consuming.

Search engines take considerable notice of how many and the quality of incoming links to your site. Traditionally, webmasters have sent out link requests, asking to exchange links, this however is becoming more and more ineffective as people's email addresses are spammed by automated robots.

Method savvy internet marketers are now using article submissions. Here is how it works. The webmaster writes an article on the topic of their site, including a back link to their site. They then submit this to various article directories. In turn some of these article directories list this article and its back link, and also distribute it to all their members. Some even pass this onto other article sites.

This can manually take a long time however. A lot of copying and pasting of articles has to happen, you have to log in and log out of sites, and the whole thing can be very tedious. Over the past 6 months new products have been released that take some of the tedium out of article submissions. These semi-automatically go to the relevant sites and submit your article, logging in for you and populating the forms with your article. They can be a great time saver.

Finally there are new services that actually go off and submit your articles for free to other large directories. They advertise on your article page on their site. This is a win-win situation. The article writer gets valuable backlinks to their site or their content read by many people, the large article directory gets the extra content and advertising revenue, so everyone is happy.

We highly recommend article writing for marketing your site, it may take a little time but with the services outlined here it need not be so painful as it once was.