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

The Holy Grail for the majority of site owners is to get a steady flow of free traffic and that entails getting your site displayed on the first page of the natural search results for the major search engines, including the big three of Yahoo, Google and MSN.

Some years ago this was quite simple even in quite competitive markets however now it has become very much more difficult 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 complicated business nowadays and entire books have been, and are still being, written on this subject. However, one thing that almost all of the experts agree about is the importance of slowly and steadily building links to your site and one of the most effective 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 on various topics related to your site, with every article being accompanied by a resource box that provides links back to your site. In this short article we are going to 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. Here, our attention is focused upon how you submit your articles to the article directory sites.

There are a variety of opinions here and, as with many things in the world of search engine optimization, you will be well advised to try out various different approaches and carefully document both what you do and the results you get. Then, once you have gathered sufficient statistics you will find that it is a quite simple thing to see precisely what works and what does not work. An alternative approach is simply to listen to what other people are saying on the subject but the difficulty here is that there is a great deal of misinformation around either from individuals who have little or no real knowledge and are simply trying to sell you something or from people who would deliberately mislead you because they view you as a possible competitor.

The first option is to hand submit your articles. With literally hundreds of article directory sites at your disposal this is not a sensible option, unless you are going to limit yourself to submitting to only the major, well established and high traffic article directories. This is certainly possible and there are many people who believe that this is the best option as they argue that the majority of article directory sites have little if any standing as far as the search engines are concerned 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 by other webmasters.

The second option is to submit your articles to a large number of article directories which means either using a submission service or some type of article submission software.

There are several submission services, but only a handful will provide you with a good service and leave you happy that your articles has been submitted to a specified list of sites within a reasonable time frame. The main drawback to these services is that you have to commit yourself to a monthly payment and they are often extremely expensive.

Turning When it comes to article submission software, there are once again several choices available from the very costly to the extremely affordable. If you feel that this is an option that 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 directory sites can you submit to? Can you add your own article directories to the program? Are you provided with a submission record so that you are able to see quickly just how successful every article submission has been?

One final consideration is whether you ought to submit the same article to the article directory sites, or ought to produce a number of 'unique' articles from your original article so that every directory gets a different version of your article? Many people will tell you that it does not matter and that the present debate over duplicate content is overblown. Other people 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 many of your article links as they find that they are from identical articles. Once again the secret here is to test for yourself and see just what results you get.

Should you decide that using unique articles is the right way to go then you will have to investigate the range of article rewriting software available. Once again take your time and examine each program very carefully. The vast majority of software programs are extremely fast and simple to operate, but also generate very poor quality articles. There are however some software programs that, despite the fact that they require a little more work on your part, produce some excellent results. There are also some software programs that will not only produce unique articles but also 'package' them ready for importing directly into some of the article submission programs.

There is no doubt that submitting articles does work in terms of building links for your site and will certainly bring in free search engine traffic. You do however have to setup a submission process that suits your work routine and budget 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 current health articles and much more.