Article directories are always an article publishers first resort but today the internet is so saturated with article directories one often wonders which article directories they should submit their articles to first to get the most exposure to them so they can start receiving Traffic and Sales from their hard work.

I've been publishing articles online for a few years now and religiously submit them to the article directories I have listed below simply because they are considered the TOP article directories on the web today and is where I receive most of my traffic from.

From my experience I recommend anyone just starting out online with article marketing to submit your ready to publish article to the article directories listed below first before searching the web for all the other hundreds of article directories that only get a fraction of the traffic these ones get.

So with that said here's the list I've put together with the article directories Alexa Ranking and Popularity Rank.

And just so you know these numbers may change but as of this writing this is what they are.

TOP Article Directories:

www.EzineArticles.com (Alexa Ranking - 327 PR 6)

www.A1Articles.com (Alexa Ranking - 78,153 PR 4)

www.ArticleAlley.com (Alexa Ranking - 23,377 PR 5)

www.Amazines.com (Alexa Ranking - 29,699 PR 4)

www.ArticlesBase.com (Alexa Ranking - 4,007 PR 5)

www.GoArticles.com (Alexa Ranking - 21,680 PR 6)

www.IdeaMarketers.com (Alexa Ranking - 42,871 PR 3)

www.SearchWarp.com (Alexa Ranking - 7,094 PR 4)

www.ArticleCity.com (Alexa Ranking - 43,159 PR 5)

These article directories should give you a good start and as you can see from the numbers above these article directories get great amounts of traffic and have good page rank which will also help you out with your Search Engine Ranking.

I have a few quick tips for you before I wrap this up and that is make sure your articles are at least 500 words or more. Article directories are starting to decline articles that are less then that number. I know this because it happened to me on a few occasions.

My next tip is try to write your articles around some keywords that are actually being search for. I recommend keyword phrases with three or more words in them. The reason being is these keywords have less competition which means your article will have a greater chance if ranking higher in the search engines for that given keyword phrase.

The last one I have for you is about Anchor Text. Most of the above article directories will allow you to use Anchor Text within your resource box so make sure you do your keyword research and find some good low competiton keywords that you can rank for and link to within your resource box.

Hoped this helped and good luck with your article publishing.