Once you have submitted to a popular article directory like Squidoo.com or EzineArticles.com, no further work is necessary to get crawled. These directories are crawled so often that the search engine spiders will find your articles and add them to their indexes.

The KEY, however, to getting a top listing on the first page of search results in a search engine like Google, is to have your content optimized for a low competition keyword. Content is the first thing that the search engines look for. They take other things into consideration as well.

Some aspects they look at are:

Popularity - how many sites are linking directly to your article's URL, and are those sites popular themselves?

Linked Site Content - the sites linking to your article, are they relevant to your content?

Anti-Spam - If your keyword density is too high, the search engines will mark your content as SPAM and you'll be left wondering why you didn't ever get any traffic. Density of 1-2 % is ideal for the keywords you focused your article on.

Bookmarking your articles on social networks like Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, or Del.icio.us are ways to create some quick back links and get the spiders to your page faster.

Overall though, getting a listing comes down to your content and how relevant it is.