The term article marketing means writing articles and allowing other websites, blogs, or ezines to publish them, generally at no charge. The publishers allow you to include a short biodata and to link back to your own site. Links usually wil be located in the "resource box" associated with your article.

Article marketing is useful for establishing a website as an authority, to generate leads and to increase the visitors to your side and to increase its search engine rank. The popularity can be proven by the fact that many softwares and websites are available to distribute articles to a large number of websites.

To quickly increase your search rankings, you may want to consider subscribing to a service that will re-distribute your article to other distribution lists. As your article gets disseminated to a larger group of viewers, the chances for web hits increases exponentially. Usually the companies that distribute your article will accept it free, but charge a small fee, commonly less than $10, to make it available to other sites.

However, article marketing can be for anyone with an area of expertise who can write well, not just internet marketers. For nearly any topic, there's a website devoted to it, readers who are looking for new information, and webmasters who would love to publish exciting new content. Free articles are an easy way for a webmaster to spice up their sites.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, also merits consideration in article marketing. A publisher must be know commonly used search terms and understand the mechanisms by which search algorithms work. These tools will ensure that only those articles will be placed which match site visitors with the information they require.

However, SEO is not limited to always publishing content that is more searchable. The coding, structure and presentation of the website may be designed, during the site development stage, to enable search engines to properly index the site. Additionally, the webmaster may introduce unique content to the site that is not only attractive to the site visitors, but is also easily indexed by search engines.

Writing an article is a great way to have your name associated with the related topic and establish yourself as somewhat of an expert. The best articles give focused, easy to understand information. Directly plugging your product or service in relation to the topic lessens your credibilty on the subject. If the article sounds like an ad, many websites may not put it up on their site at all. A successful article satisfies the need of the visitor, not just the writer.