Submitting articles to the search engines is a time honored strategy for generating traffic. It has been used since the early days of the Internet and is still an effective traffic generation strategy even in our Web 2.0 times.

There are a lot of questions over the best method of submitting articles for maximum traffic and effectiveness. What are the best techniques and which are the most effective?

The first technique is to submit your article to the granddaddy of all article directories, EzineArticles. This site has built a reputation of being the best article directory in town. It is loved by marketers and by readers and most importantly, by Google.

It is a source of frustration to many marketers who find it hard to meet the submission guidelines or cope with the timescales for articles to be approved.

However, if you read their guidelines and stick to them, your articles will get through without a hitch.

Once they are in EzineArticles you instantly receive benefits from it. Articles in this directory tend to rank very well in Google, even without backlinks to them.

Add in a few backlinks and suddenly you find your articles are ranking in the top ten for moderately competitive keywords. In fact, even without backlinks they can often rank well just because they are on EzineArticles.

Once your article has been published you need to do some simple backlinking to it just to give it that extra boost in the search engines.

Firstly, take your EzineArticles author RSS feed and submit it to RSS directories. You can either use a tool or do it by hand. If you are doing it by hand, just pick the top ten directories in a Google search and that will be good enough for now. You can always submit to more later on, so make sure you keep track of which ones you have added your feed to.

You can also use one of the many ping sites to ping your article. This does give EzineArticles a lift, but it also gets your article noticed.

Finally, social bookmark your article. Again, you can either use a tool or do it manually. If your article is newsworthy and well written then you can look at adding it to sites such as Digg or Stumbleupon to get further links and traffic.

Of course, there are other article directories out there, but none of them carry the weight of EzineArticles so focus there first to maximize your results.

For the other article directories it is not worth submitting articles manually to them, except maybe the top half a dozen big directories. Many of the rest get so little traffic it is not worthwhile, except for the backlink. Therefore you should either outsource or automate these submissions to free up your time to concentrate on building your business.

If you are submitting articles then you need to make sure they are on EzineArticles for maximum traffic. Do some simple backlinking to your article and you will easily find your articles ranking well for their keywords and bringing you steady traffic.