It's common knowledge that writing articles and submitting them to directories can generate free traffic for your website but there are certain things you can do to maximise the amount of visitors that will read your articles.

It's all about targeting "the long tail" which is the main factor that determines how successful your articles will be at generating traffic. It can mean the difference between an article that generates hundreds of visitors and an article that generates thousands of visitors.

In case you don't know, "the long tail" refers to keyword phrases that are highly targeted and have less competition than the most popular keywords. For example, instead of using a keyword phrase such as "weight loss" which has a lot of competition, its far better to use a keyword phrase which has less competition such as "fast weight loss tips".

So the first thing you need to do is find keyword phrases that are related to your website (using a keyword research tool such as Good Keywords). You are looking for keyword phrases that have around a thousand searches per month in Overture (which is only a fraction of how many times it will be searched for in Google).

Then you need to write an article which is highly optimised for this keyword phrase so that it ranks first on the search engine results page. The best article directory on the internet for achieving high rankings is called Ezine Articles and its the only one you need to use for this strategy.

The title is the most important part of the article and it should contain the keyword phrase as this will quickly attract the search engine robots and get your article listed in the results pages for that specific keyword phrase so that whenever someone searches for it your article will appear at the top.

The keyword density of the article is also important and you should include the keyword phrase you are targeting at least three times in the actual content of the article. Just remember not use it too many times as this will actually harm your rankings due to keyword stuffing.

As long as the keyword phrase is in the title of your article you only need to use it a few times in the content to rank well in the search engines. You should aim to write at least 300 words and create an interesting article that is of high quality and easy to read.

The resource box should include a brief description about your website and what you are offering and you should also use the keyword phrase as the anchor text for your link. This will help to improve your rankings so that your website appears at the top of the search engine results pages.

This is why its important to target "the long tail" because if you have less competition you will quickly and easily rank on the first page for the specific keyword phrase. The traffic generated will be far less than the main keywords but it will be highly targeted and produce better results.

After you have finished you can just repeat the process over and over again by writing individual articles that target specific keyword phrases which are related to your website. If you use this strategy correctly you can quickly dominate many different keyword phrases and generate highly targeted traffic for your website.