In that case then, mass submissions (compared to submitting to only one or two article sites) does make more sense in the long term. You may not get as much traffic from the articles themselves (since they won’t rank as high) but having so many back links will help your own site rank and eventually get more direct traffic from the SE’s.

However if that is what you want to do then “yes” everything you said is true. If you want that one article to rank highly then you should only submit that unique article to ONE directory.

Just to clarify things, then I am suggesting to submit your articles to as many directories as possible in terms of getting as much inbound links to my site as possible, because I am normally working on getting MY site to rank instead of the articles submitted.

Mikael

I completely agree with you on putting more focus on getting your own web pages to rank but if the main purpose of article submissions is to generate traffic, I’m thinking it’s only advantageous to do everything possible (within reason) to help them rank well and stay ranked even if it takes a bit more time to optimize them. That way you don’t have to keep churning them out to replace the ones that no longer rank well. Your thoughts?

I would say that linking to them is the best way to keep them ranking. After all they are just “web pages” like every other page.

One thing I would add though is that I would probably rather try to rank my website instead of putting too much energy into ranking articles placed on a website that someone else owns.