Article marketing strategy requires some thought about which benefit is most valuable – more audience, search engine optimization or Google’s well-known PageRank.

Some article marketing networks are good at delivering audience, others provide a site with better search engine optimization and others still enhance the PageRank of a site.

Some networks don’t deliver much of anything.

EzineArticles.com is a good example of an article marketing directory that provides all three benefits. It is the largest such directory on the Internet and receives millions of unique visitors each month. A unique, well-written article potentially can receive thousands of page views within a matter of months.

If your article has a link back to your site, that audience will follow the link and produce the first benefit, which is more audience.

If search engines are allowed to follow the link, they can index and rank the page on your site. This is opposed to the practice of “nofollow” on a link, which does not allow search engines to follow it.

The lack of a “nofollow” on EzineArticles produces the second and third benefits, which are search engine optimization and PageRank value. If the anchor text in the link targets a particular keyword or phrase, the page on your site receiving the link is enhanced in search engine results. If the article on EzineArticles eventually acquires its own PageRank of 1 or higher, it will pass some of that rank through to the linked page as well.

Beyond EzineArticles, the value of other article directories becomes less certain. At the time of this writing, ArticlesBase.com is the second largest directory, which results in some site visits from links, but it practices “nofollow,” so the linked page gets little SEO or PageRank value.

A large site such as HubPages has strong SEO and PageRank value, but little direct audience benefit because the articles must be much longer, which pushes any link far down on the page.

Other sites that are much smaller don’t use “nofollow,” but their small audiences provide little direct traffic.

So decide which benefit means the most for the page on your site that you want to promote. Then choose the article network that does the best job of providing that specific benefit.