Most people who build a website eventually figure out that the only way to make anything, no matter how cool your site is, no matter how great the content is – is that traffic is king. Without anyone seeing the product you are offering for sale, there is no point even trying. Think of it this way, lets say you invented the next great widget – you know it will really sell and everyone you have shown it to agrees that it’s the best. If you advertise in the desert, it does not matter because no one sees it. If you spend your advertsing dollars in a busy city, you will have success because everyone sees it. The difference is traffic. Article directories are like a gateway to the city from the desert.

Submitting your original content to an article directory is very easy, but first you need to do the keyword research. While this may seem slow and boring (or even a pain), it really has to be done to get decent results from your work. Keywords are used in the article, and in the link back to your site from the article directory. The search engines use the keywords that link to your site as part of the analysis for the ranking formula. The reason you need to do research is there is a fine balance between useless (as in never used search terms), and super competitive ones where it will be too hard initially to try to get ranking for. So when you submit your articles to an article directory, you want the keywords to have decent search volume, but not massive so you can get the most bang for your time.

Your article will be displayed with thousands of others in the article directory. Users needing content for their sites come to article directories and then grab content to fill in their site. Additionally, people subscribe to the RSS feeds from article directories that have them to get fresh content via RSS when it is published. Sometimes an article directory is also considered an authority by Google and others, thereby getting a link coming from that site garners more weight than from other links that do not have this authority.

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