The ultimate aim for the majority of website owners is to achieve a flow of free traffic and that entails getting your website displayed on the first page of the natural search results for the main search engines, including the big three of Yahoo, Google and MSN.
Some years ago that was fairly simple even in quite competitive markets but nowadays it has become very much harder as the Internet has grown dramatically and the search engines are now much more sophisticated at assessing websites and determining just which websites should be given prominence in their listings.
Search engine optimization is a complex business today and entire books have been, and are still being, written on the subject. One thing, however, which almost all of the experts agree upon is the importance of slowly and steadily building links to your website and one of the most effective ways to do this is by writing articles and then submitting these to a variety of article directories. But, there is a right way and a wrong way of doing this.
Your starting point is to write a number of articles on various topics related to the theme of your website, with each article ending with an 'about the author' box which provides links back to your website. In this brief article we are going to 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 submit your articles to the article directories.
Here opinions are mixed and, as with many things in the world of search engine optimization, you will be well advised to try various approaches and carefully document what you do and the results you get. Once you have accumulated enough data you will find that it is a fairly 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 although the problem here is that there is a great deal of misinformation around either from those who have little if any real knowledge and are simply trying to sell you something or from individuals who set out to deliberately mislead you because they see you as their competition.
Your first option is to submit your articles by hand. With many hundreds of article directory sites at your disposal this really is not a workable option, unless you limit yourself to submitting only to the main, established and highly trafficked article directories. This is possible and there are a lot of people who believe that this is the best option because they would argue that the vast majority of article directory sites have little if any 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 much to get your articles picked up and distributed by other webmasters.
Your second option is to submit your articles to a wide range of article directories which means either making use of a submission service or some form of article submission software.
There are a number of 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 period of time. The main drawback to these services is that you have to commit yourself to an ongoing monthly payment and they are very expensive.
When it comes to article submission software, there are once again various choices open to you from the very expensive to the extremely affordable. If this is an option which appeals to you then you should check out various options and to look carefully at precisely what each product will and will not do. For example, does the software fully automate or semi-automate the submission process? How many article directory sites can you submit to? Are you able to add your own list of article directories to the submission process? Does the software provide you with a submission log so that you are able to see easily how successful each article submission has been?
One final consideration is whether you should submit the same article to the article directories, or should produce a number of 'unique' articles from your base article so that each directory gets a different version of your article? A lot of people will tell you that it really does not matter and that the current debate about duplicate content is considerably overblown. Others however will tell you that, although it might 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 them to be from identical articles. Again the answer is to test for yourself and see just what sort of results you get.
Should you decide that submitting unique articles is the right route to follow then you will need to investigate the range of article rewriting software available. Again take your time and examine each program very carefully. Most programs are very fast and simple to operate, but also create very poor quality articles. However, there are a few programs available which, despite the fact that they do require a little more work, produce some excellent results. You can also get some programs which will not only create unique articles but also 'package' them for importing directly into some of the article submission programs.
There is no doubt that submitting articles really does work in terms of building links for your website and will bring in free search engine traffic. However, you do need to setup a submission process which fits in with your work routine and budget and that means testing the system until you achieve the results you want.
Author Resource:-
WebMarketingCentre.com provides information on article writing and article submission and is also an article directory where you can pick up a free online article for your website or ezine and to which you can submit articles on a wide variety of topics including articles on diabetes and much more.
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