Article sites is the term used by internet marketers when referring to free article directories. In this respect the word "free" means, free to use the articles unchanged in your own ezines and web pages as long as you publish the article in its entirety, and also preserve the full linking within each article. You should always read the terms of use of each directory, but that in essence is the core philosophy and reason for existence of so called "articles sites".

Posting your articles to "articles sites "is great for gaining backlinks and traffic, and it is a good ideas to always Submit your articles to several directories. Then several weeks later, check your web site reports to see if the URLs for any of the directories are showing up as "referrers". Some directories are better than others at delivering direct traffic. Submit to the right websites and start seeing traffic almost immediately.

So, article directories are websites that house free articles, and these articles are usually put there by whoever owns the copyright to them as a promotion method. Authors retain first rights and they still retain ownership to all the articles placed on article directories or banks. Some article bank sites publish e-zines themselves that include recently submitted articles. Still more run ad-swap requests and provide an "articles wanted" area, too.

Look out for author resource box links that will allow you to put your site links with targeted anchor text, also known as keywords. If a particular article site does not allow you to place site links thens imply move on to the next.

People who use the Internet to find products, services and information are always looking for authority figures that they can trust to deliver the right information to them. People like to buy from someone who knows what they are doing. Writing articles lets customers know the business owner is doing more than selling a product, they are selling a product they understand and believe in. Enhance this effect by providing a comprehensive profile where you say something about yourself. It goes without saying that it is also well worthwhile uploading an image of yourself for the same reason.

Despite the good news about article sites, which I have related in this article, web masters do tend to have a love-hate relationship with article submission. Some dread article submission due to the tedium of entering all the necessary details into multiple sites. However, most web masters still force themselves to do so because article marketing is so effective in driving targeted traffic to their websites.

Article site owners are starting to realize that in order to get quality articles they need to do one very important thing themselves. This is to get the page rank of the article directory high enough that quality authors will be eager to post with them. This should not be difficult with some basic advertising, after all, article directories are teeming with fresh content everyday, and they are constantly updated.

Nevertheless, they will still need work done on them by the article poster, and most people do not realise this. This is, for each article page, the person who posts the article will gain an unfair advantage over most of his/her competitors if he provides one or more direct backlinks pointing into each of his/her articles to get the page registered and eventually ranked.

If when you post each time you should also create at least one backlink to that post, and your article posting efforts will have much more traffic and ranking success.