Do It Correctly And Article Submission Will Put Your Website On Page One Of The Search Engine Results

The prize for most website owners is to achieve a flow of free traffic and that means getting your website displayed on page one of the natural search results for the major search engines, including the big three of MSN, Google and Yahoo.

A few years ago this was reasonably easy even in competitive markets but now it has become much harder as the Internet has grown rapidly and the search engines are now very much more sophisticated at assessing websites and determining just which websites ought to be given high.

SEO is a complex business nowadays and whole books have been, and are still being, written on this subject. One thing, however, that virtually all of the experts agree on is the importance of slowly and steadily building 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 right way and a wrong way of doing this.

The starting point is to write a series of articles on a variety of topics related to your website, with each article ending with a resource box that provides anchor text links back to your website. In this short article we will 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 directories.

Opinions are mixed here and, as with most things in the world of SEO, you would be well advised to try out various different approaches and to carefully document what you do and the results you get. Once you have gathered enough statistics you will discover that it is a fairly simple thing to see precisely what works and what does not work. An alternative approach is merely to listen to what other people are saying on the subject but the problem here is that there is a mass of misinformation floating around either from those who have little or no real experience and are merely trying to sell you something or from individuals who would deliberately mislead you because they see you as their competition.

Your first option is to hand submit your articles. With literally hundreds of article directory sites at your disposal this really is not a viable option, unless you limit yourself to submitting only to the major, established and high traffic directories. This is certainly possible and indeed there are a lot of people who believe that this is the best option as they argue that the majority of article directory sites have little if any standing in the eyes of the search engines and so few visitors that they will attract little traffic to your articles and not do a great deal to get your articles picked up and distributed by other webmasters.

Your second option is to submit your articles to a large number of directories which means making use of a submission service or some form of submission software.

There are various submission services, but only a handful will provide you with a satisfactory service and give you the confidence that your articles has been submitted to a specific list of directory sites within a reasonable time frame. The main drawback to submission services is that they require you to commit yourself to a monthly or annual payment and they are very expensive.

TurningWhen it comes to submission software, there are once again several choices open to you from the quite costly to the extremely affordable. If you feel that this is a route that appeals to you then you need to check out a number of options and to look carefully at precisely what each product will and will not do. For example, does the software semi-automate or fully automate the submission process? How many article directory sites will the software submit to? Are you able to add your own directories to the software? Does the software provide you with a submission record so that you can see quickly how successful each submission has been?

One final consideration is whether you ought to submit the same article to the directories, or ought to produce a series 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 present debate about duplicate content is overblown. Other people however will tell you that, while it may not appear to be important in the short run, in the longer term the search engines will discount many of your links as they find them to be from identical articles. Once again the secret is to test for yourself and see exactly what results you get.

If you do decide that creating unique articles is the right way to go then you will need to investigate the wide range of article rewriting software available. Once more take the time to look at each program carefully. The vast majority of programs are very fast and easy to operate, but also create what are clearly 'machine' written articles. However, there are a few programs that, although they take a little more work on your part, produce some first class results. There are also some programs that will not simply generate unique articles but also output them ready for importing directly into various article submission programs.

There is no doubt that submitting articles really does work when it comes to building links for your website and will certainly bring you free search engine traffic. However, you do have to setup a submission process that suits your work routine and budget and this means testing the system until you achieve the results you want.

Article Source: http://www.christiannotepad.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 articles on diabetes and much more.