A good way to build authority and search engine rankings for your site is through article directories. They usually don’t generate a lot of traffic, but they do provide quality one-way links back to your site, and there’s always the possibility of the articles becoming popular and generating direct traffic. The two biggest directories are www.goarticles.com and www.ezinearticles.com. These are the best in terms of quality and what they allow, but there are hundreds of others to choos from. If you’re interested, you can check out this list of about 2200.

So what are the benefits, and what do you have to do? First of all, Don’t submit any article that aren’t quality. You don’t want your name on something that isn’t good work.  Another thing you DON’T want to do is submit duplicate content, especially stuff you haven’t written. This is bad for your article, and just bad all-around. So don’t just copy other’s material. One useful technique that I’ve found and utilized when I don’t have the time or I don’t want to take the effort to write an article from scratch is this: Find an article that looks good, read it over and make sure it has some good content. Then you cut and paste the article into Google Translator, and translate it into German (you don’t have to do German, I’ve just made a habit of using it because I’ve found it goes back into English smoothest). Once you’ve got it in German, copy it again, and translate it back to English. Go through the article and clean it up, because translator doesn’t always do a great job of going into smooth English. 

Make sure that in all your articles you link back to your site, preferably with a hypertext link. If the article site doesn’t accept HTML, then just paste in your URL. This will ensure you get at the least a quality one-way link back to your site. And as any competent Internet Marketer knows, quality one way links are what paves the road to number one Google listings.

Facebook is a social utility that can easily be utilized to gather traffic to your site. Even if you don’t get much traffic, it’s good for link-building to, a key (as any competent internet marketer will tell you) to SEO.

As always, the first step is to create an account. Chances are good that you have an account already.Even if you don’t use it, I would suggest creating a new one, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, you may want to use an account under your name in the near future. And if you’re site is on, say, camping tents or nursing homes, then your friends will probably wonder why the heck you’re joining weird groups. It’s not hard to create an account at all either.

When you create your account, Edit your profile a little. Add some details about your life (or just make up some believeable facts about an imaginary person). This helps your account to look legitimate to other people, and to Facebook. It isn’t wholly necessary, but it does give somewhat of a boost.

Next, you’ll want to join some groups. If you look at the navigation bar on the left side of the browser window, you’ll see an option titled ‘groups’. Click on this, and it will pull up a page of your groups. You’ll want to look around for groups related to your website. Join somewhere around 10, if you can find that many. You can do later more, but 10 is good for starters. You now have a couple of different options. You could post on the wall. This won’t work so well (if you’re aiming to get direct traffic) in larger groups, because their walls tend to move very quickly, and posts get pushed off the first page. Of course, there are those gems with tons of people that don’t use their walls so much, so be on the lookout for those.

As for the number of members in a group, it wholly depends on the group. Some groups with 100 or less will have tons of activity, while some with over 1,000 members will have little or no activity. There isn’t much of a limit or a minimum; it depends on how involved a group is. So try to find groups with high involvement level.

Another thing you should do is start your own group about your topic. This ensures there’s a group on exactly your niche, and you might actually get people to join it (don’t expect it, unless you go around and ask a bunch of people to be your friends). On your group, put a paragraph or two about your topic, and commend discussion on the topic.

One last thing that you can do is look around in groups  and ask a bunch of people–preferably those who seem to be interested in the same things as you site-wise–to be your friends. This gets some internal linking going around your profile page.

Any popular blogger or website writer knows, that a high search engine ranking is key to blogging success. Without it you lose an immense amount of traffic that could be obtained through it. It’s probably the most successful, and possibly the easiest way to gain traffic.

So you are wondering, how do I submit to search engines… Now our goal is to only give information to you that is free. So here are several free sites  that you can submit your link to, to get into search engines. People often think that you need to pay for these. There are many sites that do require you do this, but Don’t! They are practically a scam because 99 percent of traffic from search engines will be from yahoo, google, or aol. Don’t pay any money for people to add you, there are plenty of free sites that will accomplish what you want.

I recommend these sites, Submit Express and FreeWebSubmission. They are both free and easy to use. But they only add you to about 20 sites, which is good but it excludes a few. This is another site I recommend that adds you to about 300 search engines. Meta Net Promotions.  Also free but for this one you need to add their link on your page. You will have to decide how important some of your sidebar is to you. I would do it because you can always take it down in a few weeks. These sites will require you to add it, then they will check once to make sure you put it up. But they don’t do repeated checks so you can just take it down a couple weeks later, wait a little to be safe.

Now let me verify something. Your traffic from search engines will vary depending on what you choose as your keywords. If you write an article about google, you will never get a visit from it. It is to big a site for you to ever possibly rank. So you need to find keywords that are related to your site, but that are still possible to rank for. You can get a good idea of how hard it’ll be to rank by typing in the phrase or word on google.com. To the right of the search blank is a number with how many urls it came up with. If it is under one million you have a chance, but to pass the other sites you need to make your site more powerful then theirs, "more coming on this in later posts."

Now if you are a beginner you are probably wondering what keywords are, and how to rank for them. Keywords are the words or phrases that appear on your blog. You are most likely to rank higher if you say one phrase multiple times, or if that is the title of your blog, or the url. Say for example that you wanted to rank for poetry. That would be incredibly difficult. So you’d have to be more specific, like dramatic poetry, or emotional poetry. The more words in the phrase the more chance you have of ranking for it; if you use that phrase. If you were trying to rank for dramatic poetry then I’d make that the title of your post, and then mention it at least once in your post, that will help. But like I said traffic with search engines can be easy or hard depending on your choice of keywords. You may work really hard on something and get traffic for something you only mentioned once. But remeber you can never really know how successful a post will be until you post it. Google does strange things sometimes, and can move you up and down randomly so that you could rank for a hard keyword.

Now that shows you which sites to submit your url to, and helpful tips on keywords. If you follow the advice you will be another step closer to blogging success.