• By Chris Kennelly
• Published 01/16/2009
• Article Writing

The article directory acts as a destination for you to place your article, usually free of charge; in order to help generate traffic towards your site. This has a multiple effect on the internet and the internet users. The first being is that it generates more traffic for your website, as well as increasing the ranking of your website on the major search engines. In looking at your ranking on a search engine, all you have to do is consider whether or not you will scroll down to the bottom of the page of a set of search results or even go to the second or third page looking for what you had searched for. The answer is probably no, and you would have clicked one of the first generically returned results that the search engine had provided for you based upon your search criteria.

The question is how do these companies or websites get to that top position? Without getting too complicated regarding the search engines, the answer is due to the amount of links pointing to that site. How do the websites get all those links? There are many ways and one of them, specific to this writing, is via articles and article directories. By providing well thought out articles and submitting these articles to article directories, the online marketer is establishing a network of links tha

t point towards his site, which the search engines read as a popularity or authority type of index and that helps raise the ranking of the website in question. Therefore the article or online marketer will submit his or her articles to the article directories which will in turn assist them in ranking or increasing their rankings with the search engine or engines. Another benefit of the various article directories is that the articles may form the basis of the content that you may be seeking, this content should however be used via the appropriate permissions and procedures as specified by the article directories; as there may be a copyright issue that can arise. Therefore it would be best to establish what the procedures or requirements are of using articles from article directories. If one is considering that article marketing might benefit them, you must bear in mind that the article directories require that the content of the article or articles be suitable for distribution. These rules vary from directory to directory, but most commonly include basic rules that are not too difficult to work around.

You will have to ensure that you adhere to the article directories rules as you will run the risk of having your articles rejected by the editors of the article directories, which defeats the object of looking at an article marketing campaign.