There are literally thousands of article websites on the internet. That does not mean that all are equally worth your time and effort to submit content to! So how do you go about evaluating the different article directories? Here are three simple ways – but please note these three factors are not the whole story! They will merely get you pointed in the right direction.

Factor #1. PageRank
Go to the article websites homepage, and check what the pagerank is. I like using a plugin for FireFox called Search Status which shows me PR and Alexa score for every page I visit, right in my toolbar. If the main page has a decent page rank (at least 3) then that tells you that others are linking to the directory, and Google at least knows of its existence. If also gives you a small glimpse of the relative importance of that directory. The higher the PR, the better. However, PR is but one tiny surface of the elephant.

Factor #2. Alexa Score
Alexa score will give you an idea of the amount of traffic that visit these article websites. The lower the score, the better. If Alexa is more than 500,000, it probably isn’t worth your time submitting to that directory, as it just doesn’t have that much traffic. Again though, this is just one small factor.

Factor #3. Source Code
I’m going to get a little bit technical on this one, but it will give you a glimpse into how well these article websites are optimizing their pages for you. Browse to an article on the directory in question, right click, and View Source. That brings up the source code for the page. Near the top somewhere you should find a line that says “meta keywords”. If this line is present, and there are keywords in it relevant to the article, that’s a good thing. It means the article website is properly putting the keywords there. You should also check what they’re putting in there for title and description as well.

These three factors are very simple, basic ones you can check within seconds whenever you’re evaluating article websites, however the real story should take into consideration how well Google can crawl the article website, how many articles they have ranked in the search engines, and many other more complicated factors. The Ultimate Article Marketing List was created by scientifically evaluating 6000 article websites, ultimately boiling that list down to only 98. If you’re looking for the definitive list of the absolute best article websites that you can submit to, you really need to checkout the Ultimate Article Marketing List.