Do It Right And Article Submission Can Get Your Website Onto Page One Of The Search Engines

The ultimate aim for all site operators is to achieve a flow of free traffic and that means getting your site displayed on page one of the natural search results for the main search engines, including the big three of MSN, Google and Yahoo.

Some years ago this was fairly simple even in quite competitive markets however today it has become very much harder as the Internet has grown rapidly and the search engines have become far more sophisticated in their assessment of site and their determination of just which sites ought to be given high.

Search engine optimization is a complex business nowadays and whole books have been written on the subject. One thing, however, which 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 variety of article directory sites. But, there is a right way and a wrong way of doing this.

The starting point is to write a number of articles focusing on various topics related to the theme of your site, with every article being accompanied by an 'about the author' box which provides links back to your site. In this short article we are going to assume that you are familiar with article writing and do not intend to look at this particular subject. In this article we are going to focus upon how you go about submitting your articles to the article directory sites.

There are a variety of opinions here and, as with many things in the world of SEO, you would be well advised to try various approaches and carefully document both what you do and the results you get. Once you have accumulated sufficient data you will find that it is a fairly simple matter to see precisely what works and what does not. An alternative is just to listen to what other people have to say on the subject although the difficulty here is that there is a mass of misinformation floating around either from those who have little or no real knowledge and are just trying to sell you something or from individuals who set out to deliberately mislead you because they view you as a possible competitor.

The first option is to submit your articles by hand. With literally hundreds of article directories at your disposal this is not a viable option, unless you restrict yourself to submitting to only 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 option because they would argue that most article directories have little if any standing as far as the search engines are concerned and so few visitors that they will attract little traffic to your articles and not do much to get your articles picked up and distributed by other webmasters.

The second option is to submit your articles to a wide range of directories which means either using a submission service or some sort of submission software.

There are a variety of submission services available, but only a small number will provide you with a good 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 submission services is that they require you to commit yourself to a monthly payment and they are very expensive.

TurningWhen it comes to submission software, there are again several choices available from the quite costly to the extremely affordable. If you feel that 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 instance, does the software semi-automate or fully automate the process? How many article directories can the program submit to? Are you able to add your own directories to the program? Does the software provide you with a submission record so that you can see easily how successful every submission has been?

One final consideration is whether you ought to submit the same article to the directory sites, or ought to produce a series of 'unique' articles from your base article so that every directory receives a different version of your article? A lot of people will tell you that it does not matter and that the current debate over duplicate content is considerably overblown. Other people however will tell you that, while it might not appear to be important in the short run, in the longer run the search engines will discount many of your links as they find them to be from identical articles. Again the answer here is to test for yourself and see just what sort of results you get.

Should you feel 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 again take the time to look at each program very carefully. Most programs are very fast and simple to operate, but also generate what are obviously 'machine' written articles. There are however some programs available which, although they take a little more work, create some excellent results. You can also get some programs which will not only generate unique articles but also output them for importing into some of the article submission programs.

Submitting articles does work when it comes to building links for your site and will bring in free search engine traffic. You do however need to setup a submission process which fits in with your budget and work routine and this means testing the system until you get the results you want.

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 fitness health and exercise articles and much more.