Aside from owning several article directories, I am also an end user of it as I see it as one powerful and affordable technique for promoting your site. I have compiled several reasons on why you should submit to an article directory:

• Article Directories Are Free. Almost 99% of article directories are free, only a small percentage asks for payment mostly those with specific niche.
• Backlinks And More Backlinks. With every article you submit, you are always allowed to include 2-3 links in your resources page. Aside from that, there’s a few article directory that allows html in the body of the article to give you additional links.

Most of webmasters today use social bookmarking as a tool for getting traffic and building backlinks for their site, and yes it is really effective.

I am talking about this after reading Gary Baybayan’s “My Game Plan That Conquered The Marhgil Macuha SEO Contest In Google.”

He won that seo contest by Marhgil Macuha taking the top spot a day before the contest end outranking Jehzlau’s entry which used to rank for a long time. I also joined that contest and placed 3rd (I only did social bookmarking for my entry, no other link building strategies).

So what happened in my 2 days at SEMCON 2007?

1. Honestly, I wasn’t interested or should I say didn’t pay attention much to other topics other than the ones discussed by:

• Benj Arriola – SEO for Megasites.
• Jayvee Fernandez of b5media – Effective Web Copywriting
• Hans Koch of syndeomedia.com – Pitfalls of Pay-Per-Click
• Marc Macalua – Innovative Landing Page Optimization.

2. I was looking forward on hearing Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl.com for his topic “The Art of Linkbaiting” but unfortunately, by the time he was speaking, I was having a short chat outside the hall with Derek Callow (Regional Marketing Manager – South East Asia, Google), Aileen Apolo (Google Philippines) with 4 other Filipino seo wherein some good plans for local search industry were discussed.