Google panda update took the entire SEO community by storm last February 2011. Article submission was a very popular link building method and all SEO companies were providing various SEO services surrounding around article submission. However, things are not what they sued to be just about a year ago. While article submission service is still popular in the SEO community, some SEO companied came up with some modified version of SEO services when it comes to article submission.
It is clear that Google is targeting the content farmer sites like article directories that accept mass article submission. One article written and submitted to multiple article directories would provide the article owner lots of backlinks to the money site. But due to the panda update, aka farmer update, most of the popular article directories were devalued by Google therefore is not providing the same benefits as it did before.
Now the best SEO services for article submission would be to submit to the article directories that are not within Google radar. Not only you can wash your hands off after you submit the articles on those not of popular article directories, you will need to do some monitoring on the background to make sure those articles do get indexed by Google. If the articles don't get indexed, then all the work is right down to drain.
It is however not very easy to get those articles indexed. First, you will need to find a list of articles that are approved and published. Once you make a list of those published articles, you then run an index check to see how many of them got indexed. The ones that not indexed will then need to be worked on.
What can you do to get the articles indexed? Lot of things and it's not an easy task to do them either. You will need some specific SEO tools for this. You can ping the links, put together RSS feeds of the published links and post the feed somewhere online. You then submit that feed to various RSS feed engines and directories. Aside from that, you can also social bookmark those links. All these take a huge amount of time and SEO companies providing specific SEO services surrounding this area can get the job done for you.
You can still use article submission as a part of your link building campaign but if you do the steps above, you will get much better results that just simple article submission. If you know how to do them and have the time to do them, feel free to do it yourself. If you are a full time internet marketer and have multiple projects on the go, then it is very likely that you will need to hire an SEO services provider to do the job for you.
Don't just take the words on the street for granted. Article submission still works at the right hands. Just find a good SEO company and buy their SEO services on article submission.