Content writing to help with links

If they're article directories, I'm afraid their backlinks are typically very, very little help indeed. They're non-context-relevant, PR-0 backlinks. It's explained in a lot more detail in this post and in a few other threads linked to inside that post.

However, there is a way of getting high quality, relevant, very valuable backlinks from articles, and that's by having your articles syndicated to other sites in the niche. The primary purpose of doing this isn't the backlinks, though - it's the attraction of their highly targeted traffic. But the backlinks can also be a pretty nice bonus. You can read more about that in this thread.

I started writing and spinning my own unique articles for purposes of SEO and found it's worked great.

However, I submit the articles to a number of different types of sites -- article directories, blogs, web 2.0 sites, doc share sites, etc. I use automation scripts and services for this, so it doesn't take nearly as long as it sounds.

I tend to steer clear of directories, however if you are taking the time to write articles, why not create your own blog and post them them there as well as other blogs. If you are looking to build back-links, which is a major part of SEO, you can also post to places that search engine bots frequent, such as classified ad sites.

I believe it's still effective but you just need to pic like 5-10 relevant article directories. Which means article directory that has a good PR. You don't need to submit your articles in all article directories

Submitting unique contents in different PR article directories is very helpful to collect back links.

Your content must be unique or fresh form others then you boost up your keywords and website PR rank

share your articles on scribd, different article directories...

It will surely help .. in bringing people to ur website..

There's no such thing - technically - as a "high PR directory". You're actually referring to the PR of their home pages, but that isn't where your articles are published.

Article directories are websites, and websites don't "have page rank". PAGES have page rank. Whatever the page rank of an article directory's home page, your article in it is published on its own brand new page which has no page rank at all.

I'm afraid not. That simply isn't how article directories work at all.

The purpose of publishing your articles in an article directory is simply to try to get them picked up by ezine owners, website owners, bloggers etc., and published on their relevant, targeted sites to attract some relevant, targeted traffic and relevant, targeted backlinks which are worth something in SEO terms.

One wouldn't want to get traffic directly from an article directory. When a potential customer finds one of your articles by putting one of its keywords into a search engine as his search terms (which is exactly what potential customers do), the last thing you want him to find is an article directory copy, because if he finds that copy then even with (say) a 30% click-through-rate from your article, you'll still lose the other 70% of the traffic, whereas if he finds the copy originally indexed and published on your own site, instead, you'll get 100% of that traffic. So as you can see, simple logic and arithmetic dictate that you wouldn't want your potential customer traffic going off from a search engine to an article directory. Article directory copies are just for potential syndicators of the material to find (and of course that's what an article directory is: it's why they exist). They're for people who search in article directories (which customers don't), not for people who search in Google. This is why it's essential not to "write for clicks" or try to sell/promote in the articles, but to write for syndication instead.

Article directories are stepping stones.

There's no point in trying to use them for their own traffic (which you wouldn't want, that way, as you'd lose most of it) or for their own backlinks (which are only non-context-relevant PR-0 backlinks). And that isn't (and never was) what article directories are there for at all, of course.

Many people do try to use them that way, but those are all the people who end up six months later starting off all the threads you can find in this and other forums with titles like "Article Marketing Is Dead" (imagining, typically, that what they've been doing was actually "article marketing" rather than just a misguided attempt to misuse article directories for their own traffic/backlinks!). :p