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Article submissions used to be the silver bullet of SEO. Hire freelancers in India to produce articles, submit to a zillion distribution sites with keyword rich links in the footer, wait patiently, and voila! Top 10 or top 5 every time!

Great fun while it lasted! A little bit like the early days when running sites through webposition was all it took for a #1 ranking. Not so much anymore. Google has already cracked down on article submission sites, just like they did on directories. Do they still work? Not as much and the water is trickier to navigate.

Articles are still a great way to get your site out there and a great way to get links.

Here are a few pointers to make sure your articles get results:

1. Evaluate article sites before submitting. Here is a quick checklist:

* In Google cache (front page and interior pages) * Positive PR * More than 500 articles * Online more than 2 years * Avoid spammy names and more than 1 hyphen (e.g. www.supreme-article-depot.info)

2. Niche is good. I submit to smaller tightly focused niche article sites even if they are new and have less than 500 articles.

3. Build your own list (i.e. work together) Contact webmasters in your own niche and ask if they will publish your articles. If they do, keep a list of their email and contact them again in a month or so with a new article. Don't wear out your welcome though!

4. Turn those pesky recip link requests into content swaps. Evaluate the site first, and if acceptable, reply offering to exchange articles with links. Most won't respond but some do, and the ones that don't respond aren't worth the trouble anyway.

5. Forget the long lists. Submit to 10 or 15 good sites and spend your time writing articles rather than submitting far and wide.

6. Regular is best. Keep writing and keep submitting. Make sure you have fresh content for your readers all the time.

7. Take care to follow the rules. Fewer and high quality is the name of the game, so you don't want to upset the submission sites.

8. Vary footer and anchor text. Each article is submitted with a footer bio which includes links. Vary the bio and anchor text for each syndication site.

9. Consider writing a long article for you own website and submit a shorter version for syndication.

10. Don't build your entire linking strategy on articles. Keep up the one-way links, and directory submissions. Too much of any type of linking is not wise.

Perhaps the biggest mistake is to submit articles only for the links. Write articles for traffic -- links are the icing on the cake. This is a crucial difference. Blasting out articles for links may back-fire. Crafting interesting, unique content with useful information will drive traffic that converts like crazy.

About the Author

Brian Stocker MA is a former teacher and Internet Marketing Specialist. He has written extensively on Education, testing, marketing and seo. Visit is website SEO Canada