Without a doubt, the best free way to increase traffic to your website and increase ranking in search engine results is to write articles. The more articles you write and submit to quality article directories the better. This is not to say that pure quantity is important. The articles should be directly related to the content or theme of your site and they should be submitted regularly to quality article directories.

Not only are you providing quality information to web surfers, you are promoting your website and establishing yourself as an expert in your field. Every article that gets published in a directory has a good chance of being indexed by the major search engines. Importantly, the article provides valuable one-way backlinks to your site.

Writing articles as a means to promote your website and increase traffic requires persistence. It is not enough to write a batch of articles one month and then sit back and do nothing. Once your articles have been accepted and published in a directory, they will often be indexed by the search engines. However, they may be dropped from the search results as early as three to four weeks later. For this reason, it is important to submit articles continuously - at least one a week.

You may be adept at writing and have no problem writing a few new articles each week. But if you are like many other site owners, you either don't have the time or don't have the patience to write. Then there are those who just plain hate writing articles. Enter the public domain article.

Public domain articles are exactly what they sound like - articles that are written for the public to use and distribute freely. They don't have any copyright information or terms of use. You can claim them as your own and place your own name and site links within them. Though there are public domain articles out there to fit every niche, it is important to only choose the ones that are directly relevant to the content of your website.

This almost sounds too good to be true - articles that are free or almost free that you can submit as your own for as long as you want. Of course there must be a downside. The biggest problem with using public domain articles is that many other people are also using them. Many other competing websites may have already submitted the articles you want to submit.

If you submit the same article, the search engines will judge these as duplicate content and will often ignore them. Worse yet, you may get penalized for doing this often and your pages will move to the bottom of the search results or your site could be banned altogether. It is always safer to write your own unique content or have someone else write it for you. Use public domain articles sparingly.