Article marketing is a great way to promote your website.  Besides the traffic that may click through to your site from the link you place at the end of your article, the backlinks you create to your website will help increase the amount of trust the search engines place in the quality of your site, which leads to higher search engine rankings and even more traffic.

When submitting your articles to directories, you want to focus on directories that have a high PageRank to begin with.  These are the most important sites because the links they give you will be valued higher with the search engines than links from sites with a lower PR rating.  Ezine Articles is the king of article directory sites, and as you might have guessed, it has a high PageRank.

If you don’t know what PageRank is, it is a number assigned by Google that shows how much Google trusts the website.  New websites start with no rating at all, which is displayed as ‘-.’  As a site gets more popular, that is, has more links going to it, the PR moves up to 0, then 1, and so on.  The highest PageRank is 10 and very few sites have reached that level.

As you submit your articles to more and more directories, you will find that your own site’s PageRank increases as well.  That is because search engine ranking is basically a popularity contest.  As you get more links, the search engines think you are popular, so your website gets higher in the search engine results.

Even if you are just looking for a little traffic from the directory to your website, where the prospect will hopefully purchase a product, you may find that eventually you will get more traffic from the search engines than from the articles themselves.  That is because the backlinks from your articles have caused your site to look good enough to the search engines to display in the search results.

There is no mystery about the basic structure for writing website articles. Each article should have a beginning, or lead, middle, or content section, and an ending, or conclusion. Not that difficult, is it

The extra ingredient you want for website articles or ad copy that will draw traffic is this: targeted keywords or phrases. Don’t be frightened by the idea of writing an article structured around keywords. It is much easier than it sounds. If you have researched a keyword(s) you want to get traffic for in the search engines, a good rule of thumb would be this: Use your keyword(s) once in the title, once in the beginning or lead, once in each paragraph of the article content, and once in the conclusion.

If you can use this basic structure — keyword(s) rich title, lead, content, and conclusion — you will find it easy to write content that will draw search engines to your website.

Take this sure-fire structure and combine it with a bit of research on the Internet or better yet in a nearby library.

Libraries are your “secret weapon” to find material for your sure-fire article structure.  Here is the “offline” advantage — if people are writing articles targeting the keywords “electronic dog fences,” for example, by researching the Internet, they are bound to be seeing similar articles. This may not lead you to duplicate their content, but it certainly won’t help. If you go to a local library and find some magazines or newspaper articles about “electronic dog fences,” you’ll be ahead of the competition.

Use that research material with your keyword(s) and write something in the range of 300-500 words and you have your article. Don’t be frightened at the idea of writing 300-500 words. Think of it this way: One double-spaced page printed out with one-inch margins all around holds about 200-250 words. If you’ve read a few articles and taken notes, you probably have more than enough ideas and information for two double-spaced printed pages.

Using the above example “electronic dog fences,” you might try the title: “Four Ways Electronic Dog Fences Enhance Your Pet’s Life.” That isn’t the snappiest title you could find, but it does tell someone and the search engines what the article is about — while using the keywords “electronic dog fences.”

Then take the research you have done and come up with four major benefits for dogs and their owners related to electronic dog fences. Your lead might be something like: “Electronic dog fences not only make happy neighbors, they can make life better for your pet, too.”

Use each of the “four ways” you mentioned in the title as a section for your article. If you want a short article, make a paragraph for each of the “four ways,” a longer article may require two or three paragraphs about each of the “four ways.”

When you reach the conclusion, you want to do two things: Try to summarize the lead or title in the conclusion by using the “electronic dog fences” keyword(s) again, and quit.

Use this sure-fire structure and you’ll find you can build successful, keyword-rich articles for your website — even if you don’t think of yourself as a writer

However, there are a few tried and true principles that we need to do when optimizing our website. The first of which, and the one that I always tell people to concentrate on is getting quality, 1-way links pointing to your website.

The more quality links you can get pointing to your website, the higher you will rank, period.

While there are many black hat tricks and tactics that you can do for short term gain, I don’t recommend spending your time on those things. I would focus my entire effort on figuring out how to get other websites to link to yours without you linking back to them.

That is the biggest key to ranking well in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Doing this is easier said that done. One of the easiest known ways to get quality, one way links is by finding website directories and then submitting your website to them.

This can be a very tedious process, but always a very rewarding process at the same time.

You can either submit your articles to these directories manually, pay someone to do it for you, OR you can use one of the article directory submission programs out there. The best program for the money that we’ve found is a program called Article Submitter created my internet marketing expert, Brad Callen.

This program allows you to submit your articles to over 700 article directories and can save you an incredible amount of time in doing so. You simply enter your article details into the software once, and then select the directory you would like to submit to. The software will then, automatically fill in all of the submission criteria for each directory and allow you to quickly submit your articles.

Not only does this save you time in submitting your articles, but it saves you an incredible amount of time in just finding these free directories online.

I highly suggest grabbing an article submission program if you decide to take advantage of one of the easist ways to get quality, 1-way links to your website.

You can learn more about Article Submitter and how you can download your FREE copy here:

http://articleauthority.com/submitter

Best of Success!