So you have made a great article and certainly it needs to be distributed across the web helping lot of readers and generating traffic to your website. A quality article with good information goes a long place over the Internet ensuring loads of one way incoming links, high position in SERPS and permanent traffic propelling your website to new heights.

The first step will be to submit your articles to the article directories. There are hundreds of general and niche article directories which are ready to publish your quality articles with back links to your website(s). The question is how you are going to do the submissions and which directories are you going to submit in? Certainly you don't want to see your article on ?robotics? on a porn article directory or a sports article wrongly placed in the business category on an article directory.

You may have come across

?Completely automated article submission service that submits your article to thousands of publishers around the globe... IN SECONDS!"

and lot of other software's which claim to automatically submit articles in thousands of article directories. The charges come very cheap and so is the result. Consider the facts before you utilize a software or service to do automatic submission.

Every article directory is unique and they differ in

Allowing html code in the articles

Having links in the main content

Number of links per article which varies from 2-7

Different categories and sections. (Some may have as less as 12 categories while others have more than 100 categories and the category names are not consistent across the directories)

Different types of form input.

Registration and confirmation methods.

CAPTCHA (IMAGE Confirmation) ? A picture with numbers which have to be manually entered.

Approval of articles

Maximum number of articles per user (some of them restrict to 10 articles/user)

Length of articles.

The best article directories are opposed to Automated Submissions and it is considered to be a SPAM. No automated software or service can take into account the above differences of article directories and submit to the article directories. The fact is most of the article directories do a manual review on articles and submissions and will find out the automated submissions sooner or later.

What is Manual article submission and how it is better than automated article submission?

Manual article submission is the process of analyzing where and what to submit in the directories by humans and doing each and every article submission by hand ensuring a good acceptance rate of articles.

Manual article submission involves

Finding the right article directory, creating an unique account and submitting the articles in the right category.

Modify the articles as per the need of various directories. This involves

Adding and removing html code inside the article as per requirement. Various article directories have different forms to input the articles and the input fields differ from one article directory to other.

Add, Remove, Format and position the links as per specifications. (Some article directories accept only 3 links, some others accept unlimited numbers. Some of the directories accept html codes for links while others have an option in their system for hyper links. Also some directories accept links only in the certain text areas they have provided )

Confirming the article submissions (Image confirmation, email confirmations) wherever needed and co coordinating with the editors of article directories whenever required.

The advantage over automated article submission is,

First and foremost, manual article submission is the only method an article directory approves off and automated article submission is considered as SPAM.

An article directory is organized into categories and subcategories. Editors review each article submission manually and evaluate the article's relevance with adequate data. In manual article submission the articles are submitted in the related directory under the right category which is not possible in the case of automated article submission. Automated software can't adequately submit to any article directory because it cannot study the directory's structure and decide which category is best suited.

Articles are submitted according to the different input systems of various directories by manual article submission. Whereas automated submission just posts a set of predefined data irrespective of the input fields which results in an incomplete submission followed by rejection.

No article directory is skipped in manual article submission. Any Image Confirmation and email confirmation is done immediately which is not possible with automated software. Incase for any reason the article directory is down or the article submission is not through, then it will be done another time.

More emphasis on niche article directories related to your website theme.

Good acceptance rate and thus more links compared to an automated submission.