some of the article directories i notice that the backlinks are nofollows. Download a Firefox add-on called NoDofollow to help you identify type of backlinks.

And i think its better to Messure how fast you can rank with one article based on the quality of the pages on googles 1st page results rather than the quantity.

It's hard to say for sure without knowing how strong the sites are that rank highly for the keyword but less than 50k competing pages tells me it's probably not a very competitive niche, so I would say yes you can probably rank highly in such a niche with only backlinks from article directories.

Submit your articles to this website : http://www.zchand.com , Its PR 4 site and its approves articles instantly. So its great as you dont hav to wait for approval. Submit ur unique content here.

Hi there, I did just post this info below on another post, but it seems to fit the bill for your question...

A few other things to consider:

What is the niche, how diverse is the keyword pool and how strong are both the competing individual webpages in the Serps & how strong are the competing domains as an aggregate.

Competing Pages, and related information really is a useless metric... First off if you simply press F5 for the exact same search you may get an entirely different number, each data center handles the same query somewhat differently ( especially the USA .com index for google )

On top of that if there were only 10 competing pages and they had a massive amount of domain authority you may not rank on the first page for years no matter what you try and do.


Targeted article submissions are usually a great way to build your first set of "critical mass" links, it's very important you think of your site as individual webpages instead of one website.

The search engines rank pages, not sites.

Internal linking optimization can help those pages rank, but that's another topic.


Just mix up your targted URLs, Anchor Text and Resource box text.


Not mixing up your article resource box text is one of the biggest mistakes I see when most people come to me for help with article marketing, help... Actually you can read this page on my site ( I'am not trying to sell anything here, I just think the information will help you out..)

SEO Article Marketing Service | SEO Article Copywriting System

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#1 > utilize your original article on your own site, ensure that you have mapped your main keywords into the sites html page title and utilize an lsi keyword / phrase into the H1 title tag. Make sure you use your main page title keyword and another LSI keyword phrase within the first 100 words of content.

#2 > This is where you start utilizing the article with a directory

#2 > Change the articles title, so that it's different from what is on your own site

#3 > Spin the content of your article at least 10%, this is not a hard and fast rule but has proven to work in our testing very well, you can go to 15-20-25% of spinned content but our testing has found it acheived no better results and just added more work.

SideBar: What I mean by better results ='s that after the articles have been posted online & are indexed within google, the targeted backlinks posted back to our site were included within our Google websmaster tools backlink profile within 30 days. GWT is horribly slow for updating our data as most of you already know )

#4 > target the links in your resource box to the homepage of the site and the page where you posted the article, utilize your keywords of choice.

#5 > Repeat the process, the thematically relevant link does with with both page level targeting within the SERPs and overall domain authority.

#6 > Repeat the process with other directories, and just mix up the anchor text used to target pages.


Hope this will be of some help,

Regards

Marc

Established article directories which do not have nofollow in their links, are good. You can find out by searching on Google for keywords related to your niche and observing which article directories have their articles at the top.