Article directories are another very popular form of web directory, and provide a successful method with which to increase back links to your site. Authors simply have to write an article (generally around 500 words) on a topic of their choice, and submit it to any of the large number of article sites on the net. The articles need to be completely original, but fortunately there is no need to have an expert knowledge base on the subject – by doing a little bit of research, or purely using your own expertise, you can easily come up with an interesting, worthwhile article. Original content is always preferable, as there is nothing worse for readers to come across yet another article on a widely covered topic. Authors have to also be careful that they are not using plagiarised material, as this will be frowned upon heavily and could cause future articles to be bypassed by browsers. The articles can be submitted for free, to high exposure directories such as Ezinearticles, ArticleAlley, Go Articles, Articlecity and Isnare – there are many more sites, and a simple Google search will identify the best ones. A simple way to identify which sites are worth submitting to is to look at how many articles they have already, and how wide a range of other authors have submitted their material to it. Smaller sites may also be worth submitting to, especially if they are growing in size and may become popular in the future.

Most sites give you the option of including a resource box at the end of each of your articles, in which you can post all of your website details and author information, so anyone who reads the articles and finds them useful then has a direct link to your site where they can find out more. It is this that attracts visitors to your site, so the better the article, the more likely it is to provide a pathway to your site. Search engines are looking increasingly towards the bigger article directories for use in their ranking methods, so writing articles is definitely a productive way to promote your site – providing you include working links back to your site.

The more article directories your article(s) appear in, the more links to your site, and the more links, the higher the search engine ranking. Article submission does not have to be done manually, site by site, which is particularly useful for people writing large numbers of articles and trying to get them onto a large number of sites. There are programmes such as Article Post Robot, which automatically post your articles to each of the 200+ sites in their database. Another option is to commission someone else to write your articles for you, an idea known as ghost writing, but they then still credit you for the work, and it is entirely original. It all depends whether you can afford to put the time aside to write articles for yourself, as well as promoting your site in all the other ways necessary to gain a good search engine ranking.
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