No matter how you look at it, the best way to increase traffic to your site AND rank high in the search results is to have more targeted links pointing to your website. Notice that I said "targeted" links. There are several different methods of generating backlinks to your site. If you have cash to spend you can pay for links on a high PR site with lots of traffic or pay for featured placing in a good directory. There are also a multitude of free methods of building one-way links to your site.

While there is some debate, many SEO experts agree that article submission, blogging and forum contribution are among the best free methods of building backlinks. Since I wish to focus only on one-way link building, I will leave out reciprocal linking as another means of generating links. If you are looking to promote your website(s) more aggressively, then you should use all three methods of website promotion. Contributing in relevant forums not only allows you to offer your advice and showcase your expertise, it also grants you the use of a signature footer with backlinks to your website.

Starting your own blog and commenting on other people's blogs offer similar benefits to forum participation. Perhaps an added bonus to blogging is that this can be combined with social bookmarking to further market yourself and your site. Many visitors use Digg, Delicious, or something similar to bookmark and share their favorite blogs. In doing this, they are supporting your site by giving you a quality backlink from an important site. These links often help to increase your Google PageRank and move up your relevance in the search results.

These are excellent free methods of increasing backlinks to your site. However, article submission to a free article directory offers some additional benefits. Writing articles on topics consistent with your website content, and then submitting them to directories is an excellent promotional strategy. If they are well-written and useful, the articles themselves will circulate around the web as they are reprinted by other webmasters and directories. These articles help to brand your website/company and offer some genuine knowledge to people who want answers.

Unlike blogs and forums, articles are timeless. They are more easily saved, stored, and printed than are blogs and forum posts. Most article directories allow you to include up to three links to your website in the "About the Author" resource box. Here you can choose your anchor text and use your creativity to entice the reader to follow the links to your site. This can not be as easily accomplished with most blogs and forums.

If your articles are approved by some of the bigger article directories, you can gain really valuable one-way backlinks. An established article directory with a homepage PR6 can have article pages with a PR as high as PR2 or PR3. Depending on the number of outgoing links on those article pages, you could greatly benefit from these free one-way, targeted backlinks. Submitting articles frequently on a topic within your niche will allow you to build a body of work online with thousands of targeted links pointing at your web pages.

A final benefit of free article submission not to be overlooked is the ability to deep-link to subpages in your site. Since you can easily change your resource box links with each article you submit, you can target different areas or pages within your site. You can do this once in a while so that your incoming links look organic and unsolicited.

Internet marketing is a dynamic and exciting field that allows anyone with desire and creativity to compete with the big guys. Regardless of how deep your pockets are, article directory submission allows you to promote your site and yourself to an ever-expanding audience. If done correctly and frequently, article submission can help you attain the higher rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN that will drive more and more targeted visitors to your site.

Submit your articles to a spam-free, human-edited {a href=" http://www.articopia.com" target="_blank"}free article directory and increase backlinks to your site immediately.