The term article marketing involves providing articles that you have written to other web sites, blogs or ezines, usually for free. In return, you can include a short biodata and links back to your site in the "resource box" that appears under your article.

Article marketing has some great benefits. As your articles get published and passed around the web, your name gets associated with the subject of your article, and you establish yourself as an expert. These articles are also tools for generating leads and increasing your site traffic. More traffic can mean greatly improving your search engine ranking. Many websites offer software to get your article out there, or will even do the syndicating for you.

Usually for under ten dollars, some websites will redistribute an article to many other distribution lists. These lists may then distribute your article even further. Search engines can then more easily find your article when searches are performed. This becomes a very cost effective way to distribute your message and to increase your search rankings.

Article marketing is, nevertheless, not exclusively for internet marketers. Various websites are always searching for new content to enrich their pages, and are receptive to articles on many different issues. You will always be able to find webmasters prepared to welcome free submissions, and people interested in finding out more about whatever subject you are most knowledgeable in.

When marketing an article, another important thing to consider is search engine optimization or SEO. Publishers must have an understanding of the algorithms that search engines use and should have a fairly good grasp of commonly used search terms and keywords related to the article being marketed. Doing this will match site visitors to truly relevent offers and content.

Keeping SEO in mind however does not always mean publishing content which is more searchable. Sometimes it may be done during the web development stage, so that the coding and structure of the website and it's presentation enables search engines to properly index the site. Or the webmaster may decide to include unique content on his site which are easily indexed by search engines, and at the same time are attractive to human visitors.

Writing an article and getting it published on a website is an easy way to establish oneself as an expert. The best articles stay focused. They are easy-to-understand and help the visitors in some way or other. An article should not be used for plugging your product or service, at least not obviously. Otherwise many websites may not put it up. In short, the most successful article is one that satisfies some need of the visitor.