The aim for all website owners is to achieve a steady flow of free traffic and that entails having your website displayed on the first page of the natural search results for the main search engines, including the big three of MSN, Google and Yahoo. A few years ago that was not too difficult even in competitive markets however nowadays it has become very much harder as the Internet has grown rapidly and the search engines are now increasingly 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 whole books have been, and are still being, written on this subject. However, one thing which almost all of the experts agree upon is the importance of slowly and steadily gaining links to your website and one of the best ways to do this is by writing articles and then submitting these to a range of article directories. But, there is a correct way and a wrong way to do this. Your starting point is to write a number of articles focusing on various topics related to the theme of your website, with every article ending with a resource box which provides links back to your website. 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 go about submitting your articles to the article directory sites. Opinions are mixed here and, as with many things in the world of SEO, you would be well advised to try various approaches and carefully document what you do and the results you get. Once you have gathered enough statistics you will find that it is a fairly simple matter to see exactly what works and what does not. The alternative approach is just to listen to what others have to say on the subject although the problem here is that there is a great deal of misinformation around either from those who have little or no real knowledge and are just trying to sell you something or from individuals who wish to deliberately mislead you because they see you as a possible competitor. Your first option is to hand submit your articles. With literally hundreds of article directories at your disposal this really is not a viable option, unless you restrict yourself to submitting only to the main, well established and high traffic article directories. This is possible and there are a lot of people who feel that this is the best option because they argue that most 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 much to get your articles picked up and distributed to other websites. Your second option is to submit your articles to a wide range of article directories which means either using a submission service or some sort of article submission software. There are a number of submission services, however, only a small number will provide you with a satisfactory service and leave you confident that your articles will be submitted to a specific list of sites within a reasonable time frame. The problem with these services is that they require you to commit yourself to a monthly payment and they are very expensive. TurningWhen it comes to article submission software, there are once again several choices available from the quite expensive to the extremely reasonable. If you feel that this is an option which appeals to you then you should check out a number of options and to look carefully at exactly what each product can and cannot do. For instance, does the software semi-automate or fully automate the process? How many article directories can you submit to? Are you able to add your own article directories to the software? Does the software provide you with a submission record so that you can see easily how successful every article submission has been? A final consideration is whether or not you should submit the same article to the article directory sites, or should create a number of 'unique' articles from your original article so that every directory receives a different version of your article? A lot of people will tell you that it really does not matter and that the present debate over duplicate content is overblown. Others however will tell you that, although it might not appear to be important in the short term, in the longer run the search engines will discount a lot of your article links as they find that they are from identical articles. Again the answer is to test for yourself and see exactly what results you get. Should you feel that creating unique articles is the right way to go then you will have to investigate the range of article rewriting software available. Once again take the time to look at each program very carefully. The vast majority of programs are extremely fast and simple to use, but also produce absolute rubbish! However, there are some programs which, although they require a bit more work, produce some excellent results. You can also get some programs which will not just create unique articles but also output them for importing directly into some of the article submission programs. There is no doubt that submitting articles really does work when it comes to building links to your website and will bring you free search engine traffic. However, you do need to setup a submission process which fits in with your budget and work routine and that means testing the system until you get the results you want.
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