Do It Correctly And Submitting Articles Can Put Your Website On The First Page Of The Search Engines

The target for the majority of website operators is to achieve a steady flow of free traffic and that entails having your website displayed on page one of the natural search results for the main search engines, including the big three of Yahoo, Google and MSN.

Some years ago this was not too herd even in quite competitive markets but today it has become much more difficult as the Internet has grown rapidly and the search engines are now much more sophisticated at assessing websites and determining just which websites should be given high.

SEO 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 on is the importance of steadily and slowly gaining links to your website and one of the most effective ways to do this is by writing articles and submitting these to a range of article directories. But, there is a correct way and a wrong way to do this.

The starting point is to write several articles on various topics related to the theme of your website, with every article being accompanied by an ‘about the author’ box that provides links back to your website. In this brief article we will assume that you are familiar with article writing and so we are not going to look at this particular subject. In this article we are going to focus upon how to go about submitting your articles to the article directories.

There are a variety of opinions here and, as with anything else in the world of SEO, you would be well advised to try out various approaches and carefully document both what you do and the results you get. Once you have accumulated enough data you will discover that it is a relatively simple thing to see precisely what works and what does not work. The alternative is just to listen to what others are saying on the subject but the difficulty here is that there is a great deal of misinformation around either from people who have little if any real knowledge and are just trying to sell you something or from individuals who want to deliberately mislead you because they see you as a possible competitor.

The first route is to hand submit your articles. With literally hundreds of article directories at your disposal this really is not a sensible route, unless you limit yourself to submitting only to the main, well established and high traffic directories. This is possible and there are a lot of people who feel that this is the best route because they would argue that the vast majority of article directories have little standing in the eyes of the search engines and so few visitors that they are not going to attract traffic to your articles and not do a great deal to get your articles picked up and distributed to other websites.

The second route is to submit your articles to a large number of directories which means using a submission service or some sort of submission software.

There are various submission services, but only a small number will provide you with a satisfactory service and give you the confidence that your articles will be submitted to a specified list of directory sites within a reasonable time frame. The problem with submission services is that they require you to commit yourself to an ongoing monthly or annual payment and they are often extremely expensive.

TurningWhen it comes to submission software, there are once again many choices available from the quite expensive to the extremely reasonable. If this is a route that appeals to you then you need to check out various options and should look carefully at precisely what each product can and cannot do. For example, does the software fully automate or semi-automate the submission process? How many article directories can the software submit to? Can you add your own directories to the software? Are you provided with a submission log so that you are able to see quickly how successful every submission has been?

One final consideration is whether you should submit the same article to the directories, or should produce a series of ‘unique’ articles from your original article so that every directory receives a different version of your article? Many people will say that it really does not matter and that the current debate over duplicate content is considerably overblown. Others however will say that, although it may not appear to be important in the short term, in the longer run the search engines will discount many of your links as they find them to be from identical articles. Once again the secret here is to test for yourself and see just what results you get.

If you do feel that creating unique articles is the right route to follow then you will need to investigate the wide range of article rewriting software available. Once again take your time and examine each program carefully. The vast majority of programs are extremely fast and easy to operate, but also produce absolute rubbish! There are however some programs that, despite the fact that they do take a bit more work, produce some very good results. There are also some programs that will not just generate unique articles but also output them ready for importing into some of the article submission programs.

There is no doubt that submitting articles really does work when it comes to building links for your website and will bring you free search engine traffic. You do however need to setup an article submission process that fits in with your work routine and budget and this means testing and tweaking the system until you get the results you want.