• By Chris Kennelly
• Published 01/19/2010
• Article Writing

With all the new technology featuring across the web, such as that of social media, web 2.0 properties and so forth, the article directory seems to have taken a back seat, whilst marketers test these new technologies. Unfortunately though many people were caught with these properties, in the well known Google slap, and much of their efforts were reduced by these actions. The article directory, or at least the professionally managed and run ones did not suffer the same fate, continually providing value to both publishers and readers. The main benefits remain being the opportunity of establishing back links to the site in question as well as generating specifically targeted visitors to the site or promotion contained within the author’s resource box. Note the mention of the resource box, and one should remain focused upon that area to supply the link to the offer or site, many people try and drop links in the article body, which is against the published editorial guidelines of many of the article directories.

Now you may say that article directories are a dime a dozen, and so they are, however the way in which they are managed, marketed and generally conducted is the differentiating factor between the various directories. The management of the article directory is essential in keeping both the quality and the indexing at high levels

, which in turn offers value to both the reader and the publisher of that specific article directory. The marketing thereof is another aspect altogether, and is not unlike that of the online marketer building back links, link submissions and so forth. The problem is that owners of an article directory will just sit back and expect articles to come flooding in and so will the traffic, this is a mistake and a more proactive role must be taken in the branding and marketing of the directory in question. So why would you want to use an article directory? The answer is pretty straight forward, and it concerns building the authority of your site and ‘name’ on the internet. The number of back links has been proven to have a direct effect upon the level of authority that the search engines place upon a site which will affect the rankings within the search engine results pages too. This in turn affects the amount of traffic that a site can attract based upon what is termed as a natural search engine optimization source. Therefore the links being acquired from the article directory will certainly have an effect upon these results.

The article directory has also been proven as a value added source of links, as described above, as well as a great source of traffic for targeted visitors. People that are not interested in the product or service offering that is being described within the article will not waste your or their time on your site.