Article marketing is a great way to promote your website.  Besides the traffic that may click through to your site from the link you place at the end of your article, the backlinks you create to your website will help increase the amount of trust the search engines place in the quality of your site, which leads to higher search engine rankings and even more traffic.

When submitting your articles to directories, you want to focus on directories that have a high PageRank to begin with.  These are the most important sites because the links they give you will be valued higher with the search engines than links from sites with a lower PR rating.  Ezine Articles is the king of article directory sites, and as you might have guessed, it has a high PageRank.

If you don’t know what PageRank is, it is a number assigned by Google that shows how much Google trusts the website.  New websites start with no rating at all, which is displayed as ‘-.’  As a site gets more popular, that is, has more links going to it, the PR moves up to 0, then 1, and so on.  The highest PageRank is 10 and very few sites have reached that level.

As you submit your articles to more and more directories, you will find that your own site’s PageRank increases as well.  That is because search engine ranking is basically a popularity contest.  As you get more links, the search engines think you are popular, so your website gets higher in the search engine results.

Even if you are just looking for a little traffic from the directory to your website, where the prospect will hopefully purchase a product, you may find that eventually you will get more traffic from the search engines than from the articles themselves.  That is because the backlinks from your articles have caused your site to look good enough to the search engines to display in the search results.

Keep in mind that while posting articles to article directories can help to improve your search engine rankings and increase the visitors to your sites, all the work you spend writing and posting will be in vain if article directory owners choose to not post your article.

Let’s take a look at how you can stay on the good side of article directory owners and increase your chance of getting your articles posted:

1. Follow the rules. You stay on the good side of article directory owners simply by reading the submission guidelines posted on the article directory site. These guidelines explain the rules that you will need to follow in order to get your article posted. At minimum, they will describe the types of topics the directory owner will accept, formatting requirements and even word length.

2. Show your expertise. By writing extensively on a particular subject or similar subjects within a broader category, you become respected as an expert – often allowing you the privilege of having your articles automatically accepted. However, submitting articles on a number of different topics might send an alert to the article directory owner that you could be a possible spammer. You could have good intentions and simply want to submit articles reflecting the variety of different sites that you own, but having many articles on many topics could send a flag that you are aiming mainly for a high number of backlinks and the quality of your articles may not meet the requirements of their site. If you want to submit articles on a variety of topics, try submitting certain topics to certain directories or sign up with multiple usernames or pennames (if allowed by the article directory).

3. Rewrite your PLR articles. If you use private label rights (PLR) articles, be sure to rewrite your articles. Do not use them straight out of the article pack, because many others who have the same article packs will not rewrite theirs! Duplicate articles are always deleted from article directories, therefore if yours does not get in the directory first; there is a good chance your article will be deleted. Furthermore, not all article directory owners understand the use of PLR for article marketing. Do not take a chance that the article directory owner might accuse you of copyright infringement!

Remember, if you have questions, ask the article directory owner(s) because it is much easier to do it right the first time than to spend time and effort rewriting it or just being taken off the list of qualified writers for that article directory. Always submit high quality work, do not try to cut corners once you have established a rapport with the website owner.