If you are an internet marketer, or a regular internet user, you have seen an increase in the amount of article directories on the net lately. Article directories are a great place for internet marketers to promote their sites, for bloggers to gain free content, for webmasters to gain free content, and for readers to learn from experts on virtually every topic imaginable.

If you publish a website, you want it to rank high on search engines for free traffic. One main part of the algorithm that search engines use to deem the quality of a website is the number of quality inbound links. Writing articles that are relevant to the theme of your website with a link to your site in the resource box is a great way to pick up inbound links. These articles will be filled with keywords related to your site so that when the search engine spiders scan through the article, then find your link, makes the search engines like your site.

You can submit your website manually to hundreds, or even thousands of directories if you are ambitious enough. Or you can purchase an article submission tool. These take a lot of the steps out of the submission process and saves you time as your article is submitted to the list of article directories on the software's list.

There also are a few bigger article directories, some free, some paid, that will submit your article to hundreds of other article directories automatically. This saves you even more time and is a recommended way to disseminate your articles.

Many webmasters also pull articles either manually or through RSS feeds for content on their websites or blogs from these article directories. This is yet again another way to get more eyes and more links to your site.

There are also a large number of people who go to article directories for information on a specific topic. If they find your article, odds are good that they will follow the link to your website in the resource box.

If operate a blog, article directories are a terrific way to make your blog run on autopilot. You can go to article directories and set up your blog to take RSS feeds from the directories that will publish articles relevant to the theme of your blog to your blog automatically which gives you fresh content for your readers. This saves you the time and effort of righting post after post on your blog.

If you publish a website, article directories are a great way to pull relevant content for your website. Search engines like to see quality content with keywords that relate to your website and when you pull these articles you are really doing your website a favor by giving the search engine spiders more to look at.

People who write articles for article directories can bee looked at as an expert on a topic. Everyone is an expert on something and if you have publish a website and write articles about it, odds are good that you are an expert on that topic or else you would have lost interest in the project.

There are a great number of people out there who want to read your expert opinion on a topic. People grow wary of opinions from newspaper or other editorials and articles from article directories is a great way to get a fresh opinion or to learn details about a topic. There are literally articles on almost every topic imaginable so if you want to learn anything from a book or product review, relationship or financial advice, or even how to guides, article directories provide an excellent resource for this kind of information written by experts on the topic.

So if you want to promote your website, article directories are clearly a valuable tool for you to use. If you publish a blog or a website, article directories provide quality content that can be static or streaming in a RSS feed. Or if you are someone who is looking to learn more on a particular topic, you now see how important these article directories truly are and you can see when it comes to these directories, the more the merrier. So what are you waiting for, get out there and discover what an article directory has to offer you today!