If you spend any amount of time researching ways to improve your rankings on search engines by now you have learned or at least heard of the benefits of submitting articles to directories. Submitting articles can be a very profitable way to gain one way inbound links. It might be somewhat tedious to submit your articles to multiple directories but the time I spend writing the article easily out weighs the time it takes to submit it each to each directory. I recently posted a list of many of the article directories that I use. Here are just a few:

• www.articlecity.com
• www.goarticles.com
• ezinearticles.com

Sometimes these directories really give you some nice props. I was recently searching around on Ask and I came across one of my articles. The name was slightly changed so I decided to check it out. Much to my surprise Webpronews went above and beyond. They had picked up one of my articles on usability that was circulating and they actually took the time to go to an interior page on my website, take a screen shot of a banner that included a picture of myself and added it to my article. Now you can read my article on “3 Steps to Usability” and make fun of my face at the same time. It’s a win win!

One very misunderstood aspect of website development is how to obtain quality content. Many SEO experts tell you that your website needs it, they tell you this is how you get quality inbound links, but nobody ever defines what “quality content” is.

I recently posted a new article to try and help explain what quality content is and how to get it. Let me know what you think.

Vanessa Fox of Google and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz sit down to discuss and hopefully clear up much of the confusion that deals with Google’s Sitemap and Page Rank.