Many know the benefits of posting articles to Article Directory sites. If you don’t know, the main reasons are for traffic, and for search engine optimization (SEO) benefits (mainly in the form of good PR backlinks).

What to do? You need to post good content to article directories for it to be used, and for it to generate good, targeted traffic for your website. When you write an article for the article directories, they let you put a small paragraph at the end of the article as an ‘about the author’ paragraph. This paragraph can have a link or two in it. Most people want to have relevant keywords in their linking text, and that is usually one of your links. The other is usually just the URL or website address of your blog.

Your keyword filled link should point to a page deep in your site, like a relevant blog post or other similar article on your website. The URL link should go to your home page. The reasons for this are the search engines like to see links deep into your site in addition to links to your home page.

How to submit? Many people rely on tools, I do it manually, and not because I don’t like tools. I do it manually because I do not want to carpet bomb the search engines with new links to my sites. If you use these article submitter tools that submit to 450 article directories you may do more damage to your website than you know. Google can detect spam like link building efforts, and you can be penalized for it. I like to only submit an article to a maximum of 5 article directories, and I only submit to the good ones.

Where to submit articles to? I submit to the top Article Directories based on PR (Google’s Page Rank). Here is a great article by Dale King on the Top 10 Article Directories. Read that, and then make your own short list, and go open your accounts, they are all free but you have to register.

Now to the hard part, writing valuable articles related to your niche!