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The aim for the majority of site owners is to achieve a steady flow of free traffic and that entails having your site displayed on page one of the natural search results for the main search engines, including the big three of Google, MSN and Yahoo. A few years ago that was not too difficult even in competitive markets however nowadays it has become much harder as the Internet has grown dramatically and the search engines are now far more sophisticated at assessing sites and determining just which sites should be given prominence in their listings. SEO is a complicated business today and entire books have been, and are still being, written on the subject. One thing, however, that virtually all of the experts agree about is the importance of slowly and steadily building links to your site and one of the best ways to do this is by writing articles and then submitting these to a range of article directory sites. However, there is a correct way and a wrong way of doing this. Your starting point is to write several articles on a variety of topics related to your site, with every article being accompanied by a resource box that provides links back to your site. In this brief article we will assume that you are familiar with the ins and outs of article writing and so we are not going to look at this particular subject. Our attention here is focused upon how to submit your articles to the article directory sites. Opinions are mixed here and, as with most things in the world of search engine optimization, 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 data you will discover that it is a relatively simple thing to see just what works and what does not. An alternative approach is simply to listen to what others are saying on the subject but the difficulty here is that there is a mass of misinformation around either from those who have little or no real experience and are simply trying to sell you something or from people who want to deliberately mislead you because they see you as their competition. The first route is to hand submit your articles. With many hundreds of article directory sites at your disposal this really is not a workable route, unless you are going to restrict yourself to submitting only to the main, well established and high traffic article directories. This is possible and there are many people who believe that this is the best route as they 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 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 article directories which means making use of 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 satisfactory service and give you the confidence that your articles has been submitted to a specific list of sites within a reasonable period of time. The main drawback to these services is that they require you to commit yourself to an ongoing monthly payment and they are very expensive. TurningWhen it comes to article submission software, there are again various choices available from the quite costly to the extremely affordable. If this is a route that appeals to you then you should check out a number of options and to look carefully at just what each product can and cannot do. For instance, does the software semi-automate or fully automate the process? How many article directory sites can the software submit to? Can you add your own article directories to the program? Are you provided with a submission log so that you can see at a glance 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 produce 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 about duplicate content is overblown. Others however will tell you that, although it may not seem 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 them to be from identical articles. Again the secret here is to test for yourself and see just what sort of results you get. If you do feel that submitting unique articles is the right route to follow then you should investigate the wide range of article rewriting software available. Once again take your time and examine each program carefully. The vast majority of software programs are extremely fast and simple to operate, but also generate very poor quality articles. However, there are some software programs that, despite the fact that they do require a bit more work on your part, create some first class results. There are also some software programs that will not only create unique articles but also output them for import into some of the article submission programs. Submitting articles really does work in terms of building links for your site and will bring you free search engine traffic. However, you do have to setup a submission process that suits your budget and work routine and that means testing the system until you achieve the results you want.
Article Source: Free Articles - http://www.articlesworldonline.com
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 current health articles and much more.
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