Why is article marketing so important in 2009?

If you follow the seo forums, you will notice that an old search engine marketing strategy is now suddenly everyone's seo strategy of choice. Yes, I'm talking about article marketing.

With everyone even remotely interested in achieving decent search engine rankings turning to article marketing, it is critical for your website's success that you fully understand what traditional article marketing is about and how you can benefit from it. Note that as search engines become smarter with reciprocal links, article marketing - especially the sort of marketing that guarantees good results - will require some expert knowledge.

How traditional article marketing works

You write (or pay someone to write it) a 600-word article, takes out a list of 100-200 article directories, and submits your article to all of them (or you could hire someone to do that as well). In a week or so, your article is accepted and published by the article directories, not to mention thousands of websites who pick up articles from these directories.

Then, after a week or two of submitting the article, search engines pick it up and suddenly see hundreds, if not thousands, of new links to your site. Your ranking benefits thanks to the sheer number of links you've built.

Over a period of time, after several article submissions, you notice an improvement in your search engine rankings at the next algorithm update. Yes, those links have made all the difference, and now your site is starting to get higher search engine placement.

If you want maximum results for your article marketing, you would be best served by adopting the following main tactic:

Use articles as link building tools

First: Submit your articles to the top article directories, in the category that is the closest match to your topic. Over time you will notice that other websites pick up and display your articles.

Next: You should contact the owners of those websites and tell them that you will write a unique article SPECIFICALLY for their website. In this article, guess what you'll do? You'll include an in text link using your chosen anchor text that will point directly to your main money web page.

Using this method to get quality links is one of the very best, and very little used methods of getting high quality links to your websites.

Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties

Ideally, you shouldn't publish articles that you submit on your own website - this "may" help you avoid the duplicate content penalty a bit. On the other hand, this does not address the concern that carbon copies of your article will suddenly pop up in hundreds of places on the Internet. To deal with this, you can use one or more of the following techniques:

1. Post the article on your website, and wait for it to be indexed by the major search engines before you submit it to the article directories.

2. Post the full article on your website and submit "half" of it to the article directories (works best if you have a 1000 words article).

3. Have your writer create a second, different version of the article. Then, you can submit that version to the directories while keeping the original on your site.

Deep Linking

Instead of just putting links to your main site page, link to a few inner pages of your site from within the article text. Of course, the inner pages must be relevant to the article topic. This will help spread the link popularity you receive throughout the site. Deep links are one of the ways search engines use to evaluate the value of links.

Themed Links

Use different articles for different purposes. For example, you could have one article promoting your main website, another promoting your new book (and linking to the order page), and yet another article linking to your newsletter signup page. The key is to remember that articles also mean traffic, and along with deep links, getting traffic to the key money-making areas of your site is very important.