Submitting original articles to article directories with your website URL in the author bio-boxes is a tried and true method of building backlinks and thereby improving your site's SEO. Of course there are some directories that have been around for ages and are known to be the best places to submit your articles for this purpose. These include Ezine Articles, Idea Marketers, and Go Articles among others.
But it should be remembered that Google and other search engines also value the variety of locations for your backlinks. So it's definitely worth submitting to newer, less established directories as well. There are countless sites like this, of course. But you shouldn't just start Googling and then sign up to the first ones that you find.
It's important to keep an eye out for a few elements to check whether the ones you find are actually worth submitting your articles to. Firstly, have a look at the page rank of the article directory. PR is not the be all and end all, of course. But it is imporant, particularly when it comes to how much SEO benefit the directory can bestow. A PR of 4 is a very good sign. And I wouldn't submit to a directory that was below 2.
Also, assess the overall look of it. Many article directories use standard scripts, and can often look very much alike. The more unique an article directory appears, the more likely it is that the webmaster behind it cares about the project. And if he cares then he'll tend to be more careful about the quality of articles he'll approve.
Doing a backlink check with Yahoo is recommended as well. That will give you an idea of how many sites link back to the directory, as well as the number of pages indexed. The more the merrier, as they say.
And look to see if the author bio-box links are "dofollow" or not. You can do this by choosing any article, then right clicking your mouse on the page. Click on "view source". Then scroll down and you'll see the actual HTML of the links. If they don't have the word "nofollow" in there, then they're fine. (Article directories usually are "dofollow", by the way. But it's always worth making sure. A small proportion are not, and if they are like this you won't be getting any "search engine juice" from the articles published there.)
Finally, you should check when the most recent article went live. If it was ages ago, then chances are the webmaster has just moved on to other things. Needless to say, submitting an article to that directory will be pointless. This is pretty easy to check though, because most article directories do have a section listing their latest articles on the bottom of the main page.
Article Directory : http://www.articlecube.com
