Doing article marketing requires that you have a list of directories, or at least one, to submit your content to.  There is no article marketing without the directory!  However, you don’t want to submit your well-written articles to just any old site.  Here’s how you can gauge which sites really deserve your articles and original content.

Three factors for this short article directories guide that will help you with article marketing.

1. Homepage PR

PR is not a direct indication of the quality of a site, but it IS a sign of authority.  You can quickly check the PR of a page with SEO Quake or SearchStatus.  The higher the better and as a rule of thumb, don’t bother with directories that have a homepage PR of less than 2.

2. Alexa Ranking

Alexa ranking is not an extremely accurate way to measure site traffic, but it does serve as a decent quick reference.  The articles directory should have an Alexa ranking below 100,000.  If it doesn’t then it is either an up and coming directory, or it just simply won’t drive the traffic to your articles and site that you want

3. Quality of other content

If the directory is full of decent content, well ,that’s a very good sign.  A site like Ezine is pretty strict on what type of content gets published and for this reason, people still visit in order to republish this content.  You want others to republish your content so this is why you want the other content on the site to be good too.