A few years ago this was not too herd even in competitive markets however now it has become much more difficult as the Internet has grown dramatically and the search engines have become much more sophisticated at assessing sites and determining just which sites should be given high.



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

The starting point is to write several articles 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 are going to assume that you are familiar with article writing and so we do not intend to look at this particular subject. Our attention here is focused upon how to submit your articles to the article directory sites.

Here opinions are mixed and, as with anything else in the world of search engine optimization, you will be well advised to try various approaches and to carefully document what you do and the results you get. Once you have accumulated enough data you will find that it is a quite simple thing to see precisely what works and what does not work. An alternative is simply to listen to what other people are saying on the subject but the problem here is that there is a great deal of misinformation around either from individuals who have little if any real experience and are simply trying to sell you something or from people who want to deliberately mislead you because they view you as a possible competitor.

The first option is to hand submit your articles. With many hundreds of article directories at your disposal this really is not a viable option, unless you restrict yourself to submitting only to the major, well established and high traffic article directories. This is certainly possible and there are a lot of people who believe that this is the best option as they argue that the majority of article directories have little if any standing as far as the search engines are concerned 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 by other webmasters.

The second option is to submit your articles to a large number of article directories which means either using a submission service or some type of article submission software.

There are several submission services, however, only a small number will provide you with a good service and leave you confident that your articles has been submitted to a specified list of directory sites within a reasonable period of time. The problem with these services is that you have to commit yourself to a 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 costly to the extremely reasonable. If this is an option that appeals to you then you should check out various options and should look carefully at precisely what each product can and cannot do. For example, does the software semi-automate or fully automate the submission process? How many article directories will the software submit to? Are you able to add your own article directories to the submission process? Does the software provide you with a submission record so that you can see at a glance just how successful each article submission has been?

One final consideration is whether or not you should submit the same article to the article directory sites, or should create a series of 'unique' articles from your base article so that each directory gets a different version of your article? A lot of people will say that it really does not matter and that the current debate about duplicate content is considerably overblown. Other people however will say that, although it may not seem to be important in the short run, in the longer term the search engines will discount many of your article links as they find that they are from identical articles. Once again the secret here is to test for yourself and see just what results you get.

Should you feel that submitting unique articles is the right route to follow then you will have to investigate the wide range of article rewriting software available. Again take your time and examine each program carefully. Most software programs are very fast and easy to use, but also produce what are clearly 'machine' written articles. However, there are a few software programs that, although they require a little more work on your part, produce some excellent results. There are also some software programs that will not only produce unique articles but also 'package' them ready for importing directly into various article submission programs.

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