Submitting articles to article directories sites is a great way to get relevant one-way back links. However, despite proven results and success from this strategy many ‘SEO experts’ claim that the article directories are now over saturated with spam and no longer useful. This statement couldn’t be further from the truth. With some time and work you can easily achieve PR4+ backlinks as your articles get crawled by Google and gain incoming links from other websites who find the content useful.

An important concept to keep in mind is that one or two really good article directories like ezinearticles.com are better than 1,000 PR0 article directories. Quality is better than quantity in most cases. On that note here is a list of solid PR6+ article directories:

PR7:
magportal.com
webarticles.com
digital-women.com

PR6:
ezinearticles.com
bestezines.com
webpronews.com
buzzle.com
articledashboard.com
articlecity.com

Now I have submitted articles to some of these in the past, and now my some of my actual article pages are PR4+. That means I get an extremely relevant link with my keyword in the content, title tags, header tags, etc. and there are few other outbound links on the page. So this is exactly the type of link that will help me skyrocket to the top of the SERPs. For instance, look at this article I wrote:

http://www.bestezines.com/?What-You-Need-to-Know-Before-Purchasing-a-Body-Kit&id=4092

Its a PR4 and a great backlink that I wrote for an e-commerce website (EclipseCarTuner.com) a while back which jumps between #1 and #2 for the keyword mitsubishi eclipse body kits and eclipse body kits. The backlink from this article obviously helped me to achieve these excellent rankings. Make sure, however, that you first submit the article to your blog before any article directories. Just ping the blog (pingoat.com), wait for google to index it, and THAN submit the article to an article directory. If you follow this strategy, you will have a high ranking blog which Google considers to have unique content and you will also have high PR back links from article directories.