Why Article Marketing and Writing Articles is Important

Article marketing is more than just writing articles, although the writing is a very important part of it. The whole technique of marketing by means of article writing and submission to directories revolves around two primary concepts: traffic generation and search engine optimization.

Traffic Generation

When you have an article published on an article directory, you can generate traffic in two different ways. The first is through visitors to the directory finding your article, reading it and then clicking on your resource link to get to your website. That happens more often that many people believe. I have lost count of the number of times I have read that people do not read the submissions to these directories, and that they are useful only for backlinks to your web pages.

Nonsense: some of my articles are read over a thousand times, and that is good potential free traffic in anybody's book. Not only that, but they are sometimes copied onto other websites, complete with your resource links. That again can be a good source of traffic. The secret here is to write in such a way as to convince the reader that they want to learn more - or just that they should click on your link.

Another way in which writing articles can generate traffic is for your articles to be listed on Google. The page on which your article is published in the article directory is a discrete web page that can be listed by search engines just like any other. Where it is listed, if it is listed at all, will be very much dependant on how ell you optimized your article for the keyword.

Every article you write should be keyword-focused, and that keyword or phrase should be contained in the title and the first sentence of your article. Don't endlessly repeat the keyword, but mention it a few times, and also use vocabulary with the same or similar meanings. If a search engine spider, such as Googlebot, likes it, then your article could be listed for that keyword. This is not uncommon, as you will see if you carry out an internet search for any keyword.

You will possibly find a few listings relating to directories such as Ezine Articles or iSnare - these are actually article pages, and the author will have a link to their website published along with it. This is one of the major benefits of article marketing, and writing articles is a good way of advertising your website. A good search engine listing can generate a tremendous amount of traffic for your website.

Search Engine Optimization

Good use of keywords in your article is a form of search engine optimization, as is the generation of links back to your website through having it published in a large number of article directories. Article marketing is part of a good linking strategy, and writing articles is important if your web pages are to be listed prominently on major search engines such as Yahoo and Google.

Your listing position is determined by a number of variables of which use of keywords and links back to your web pages are only two. However, the links are very important, and web pages can achieve a high listing on the strength of links alone! I have seen many advertising pages on Page #1 of Google with no content but pages and pages of ads, but also with a whole host of backlinks.

It is important, therefore, that you should not only understand how to use article marketing as an advertising and SEO technique, but also how to get links to your web pages and how to apply good search engine optimization. Learn these techniques, then you will have taken a giant leap towards getting masses of free traffic because of your search engine listing.