The prize for the majority of website operators is to achieve a flow of free traffic and that means having your website listed on the first page of the natural search results for the major 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 more difficult as the Internet has grown dramatically and the search engines have become much more sophisticated at assessing websites and determining just which websites should be given high.

SEO is a complex business nowadays and entire books have been written on this subject. However, one thing that virtually all of the experts agree about is the importance of slowly and steadily building links to your website and one of the most effective ways to do this is by writing articles and then submitting these to a range of article directory websites. However, there is a correct way and a wrong way of doing this.

The starting point is to write several articles focusing on a variety of topics related to the theme of your website, with every article being accompanied by an 'about the author' box that provides links back to your website. In this short article we will assume that you are familiar with article writing and so we are not going 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 anything else in the world of search engine optimization, you would be well advised to try out various different 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 reasonably simple matter to see precisely what works and what does not. The alternative is merely to listen to what others have to say on the subject but the difficulty here is that there is a great deal of misinformation floating around either from individuals who have little if any real knowledge and are merely trying to sell you something or from people 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 directory sites to choose from this really is not a workable option, unless you restrict yourself to submitting to only the major, established and highly trafficked article directories. This is possible and indeed there are many people who believe that this is the best option as they argue that the vast 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.

Your 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 various submission services, but only a handful will provide you with a good service and give you the confidence that your articles will be submitted to a specified list of directory sites within a reasonable time frame. The problem with these services is that you have to commit yourself to a monthly payment and they are often extremely expensive.

TurningWhen it comes to article submission software, there are again many 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 should look carefully at precisely what each product will and will not do. For example, does the software semi-automate or fully automate the process? How many article directory sites will the software submit to? Are you able to add your own article directories to the submission process? Are you provided with a submission log so that you can see quickly just how successful every article submission has been?

One final consideration is whether you should submit the same article to the article directory sites, or should produce a series of 'unique' articles from your original article so that every directory receives a different version of your article? Many people will tell you that it really does not matter and that the present debate over duplicate content is considerably overblown. Other people however will tell you that, although it may not seem to be important in the short term, in the longer term the search engines will discount many of your article links as they find that they are from identical articles. Once again the answer here is to test for yourself and see just what sort of results you get.

Should you feel that using unique articles is the best way to go then you should investigate the range of article rewriting software available. Once again take your time and examine each program very carefully. The vast majority of programs are very fast and easy to use, but also produce very poor quality articles. There are however some programs available that, although they do require a little more work on your part, produce some excellent results. You can also get some programs that will not just generate unique articles but also output them for importing into various article submission programs.

There is no doubt that submitting articles really does work in terms of building links for your website and will bring you free search engine traffic. You do however need to setup an article submission process that suits your work routine and budget and that means testing the system until you achieve the results you want.

Sustainable Living Articles @ http://www.articlegarden.com 

By: Donald Saunders

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 food and nutrition articles and much more.