Its very difficult to guess, what criteria google uses to rank websites because google keeps on changing the way it ranks? One thing for sure; if you have no. of high quality 1-way links to your site, your site will get good ranking.
There are lots of paid sites which back links to your site for some amount but everybody is not willing to pay now a days. There are three ways; you can get high quality 1-way links free of cost: Blogging, Posting in forums and Articles Submission in quality sites but the topic you are posting, blogging or submitting should be similar to the contents of your site. Among all; Article submission is the best free method to generate traffic and get high quality 1-way links. If your articles are good enough to understand and having quality contents and as soon as your article is approved; the articles themselves will circulate around the web as they are recommended by other sites and directories.
If you are serious about promoting your site, then you should keep on posting the articles in Articles submission sites. There is no. of good free articles submission sites like www.e-articles.info, www.articletrader.com, seoarticles4u.com, articledragon.com etc. If your articles are approved by high PR sites, you will get valuable 1-way links.
Most article directories allow you to include up to three links to your website in the "About the Author" resource box. Here you can put the links of your site’s sub pages, just to ensure you are back linking most of your site’s pages. But submitting articles can take most of your time and if you don’t have enough time to post the articles. To solve your problem there are many firms who can submit your articles on your behalf in reasonable price but sometimes that is not acceptable. To save your time and money I have found a free tool which can submit your article in thousands of directories. Its absolutely free of cost.Y You can download the tool from http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com/
So next time don’t complain that you don’t have sufficient traffic in your site.

Thanks and Regards,
Ashish K Arora: Passion for SEO

thanks alotI appreciate your suggestions
great and informative article
sure,i will apply in future

Article marketing is not suitable for all topics. Articles written about 'pineapple flavored dogfood' will not be picked up and distributed anywhere near the amount of times that an article on 'web hosting' or 'internet marketing' or 'make money from home' articles will be. It's not only because the market is smaller for 'pineapple flavored dogfood', it's because dogfood website owners aren't as likely to seek out pre-written articles for their websites in the same manner that hosting, IM and make money at home website owners do.

Getting your article listed in 2 quality (high rank/traffic, etc) article directories will far outweigh the value you'll receive from submitting your article to thousands of low quality directories.

Having home page Google Pagerank does not automatically mean that a directory is of high quality nor does it mean that a link from this directory is guaranteed to help you.

Incoming links to your website are not likely able to harm you. However, you shouldn't waste your time seeking things that are not going to have a noticeable & positive impact on your website.

There was a time when you could stuff your meta content with words & grab top rankings in certain engines, there was a time when you could shoot to the top of Yahoo with FFA Network submission, there was a time when Safelists worked to bring in traffic and money, there was a time when blog spamming produced good results and there was a time when article submission software would have been beneficial. However, that time is not now; that time is over.

There is a very short window of opportunity between when 'the masses' catch on to a proven income producing (or traffic producing) method and when the method becomes less effective or useless. Sure, there's people banking on these methods way before we ever hear about them, but once "we" get ahold of them, we destroy the effectiveness of the method.

As marketers we destroy the very methods that we wish to employ due to automation; and in terms of article marketing, Search engines are already 'on the job' in terms of filtering out significantly duplicate content. . . which is exactly what article marketing is; the exact same thing posted to hundreds & thousands of websites - utterly useless.

All that said, I am not against article marketing - I am 100% for it, just not the form that submits to hundreds or thousands of article directories.

That's my opinion, not meaning to rain on your parade.

Yes you may be right that same article should not be published in lots of articles directories. But in today's world its not like that one single site is popular and all follow that site. Each and every article directory has its own group of people(reader) and if you want to target most of people on the web than it is always better you serve your content in all the article directories.So that you can get maximum benefit out of it.
Anyways thanks for replying.

Regards,
Ashish K Arora : Passion for SEO

I am by no means and expert in this field, but I do have a question or two: Is free article submission as good as paid article submission? What are the main differences?

Thanks!

The people who own or operate the hundreds of equally useless "article" sites would prefer you to pay.

that's the difference.

Originally Posted by vossman

I am by no means and expert in this field, but I do have a question or two: Is free article submission as good as paid article submission? What are the main differences?

Thanks!

If you mean "paid submission" by way of submission to hundreds or thousands of article directories, the benefit isn't really yours, it's largely for the people you're paying to submit your article, as was stated above.

If you want to pay someone to submit your article to one or two prominent directories, that would likely be more beneficial for you.

All this said, if you really want to get the most 'bang for your buck' in regards to article marketing, seek out web site related to yours that is valuable in the eyes of Google (since I believe it's google that places the most weight on incoming links with the anchor text used, though there are other factors). Send an email to them asking if it'd be alright to write an article exclusively for their website if you can get a static, one way link back to your site.

Keep in mind, using this method you should either be an exceptional writer or have access to an exceptional writer cuz nobody is going to take you up on your offer with useless fluff or jumbled garbage.

A link using this method will most likely be more beneficial because websites are usually topical, meaning they focus on one theme. Even high ranking article directories cannot give you the kind of weight that a link back from an authority site on your website's topic can give because article directories are all over the place in regards to topics; it's not so much that they are penalized by search engines for catering to wide ranging categories, it's more that the content 'confuses' search engines by spreading their overall relevancy for any given topic in 50 different directions.

That's my take on it, but I tend to get more effective links using this method. And no, I won't share examples. . . I use this method with other persona's, not under my own name.