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Article marketing for SEO is a tactic that helps improve search engine results for a Web site’s most important keywords.

Article marketing is the strategy of writing an article about your Internet site and putting it on another site. The other site typically specializes in articles written specifically for promotional purposes.

Anyone interested in building Internet site traffic and search engine rankings to build their online business will go to one of these sites, sign up for an account and start writing. Some of these sites require a minimum of 400 words per article, and some require much more.

Article Marketing Basics

The typical article consists of three elements:

• The title (or headline)
• The body
• The resource box. The resource box usually includes a brief biography of the writer, plus one or two links back to the writer’s site (also known as backlinks).

When search engines discover a new article on these sites, they initially may rank it high in their results because of the size and importance of a site such as EzineArticles.

The writer’s site gets value from the backlink, which in turn enhances the writer’s site in the search engine results. Uniqueness of the content improves the article’s ranking as well.

In addition, if the title, body and call to action in the resource box are good enough, visitors will click on that link and come to the writer’s site to check it out.

Getting More Clicks

The single most important part of the process is the title followed by the first paragraph. It is the title and description that are displayed by the article sites and the search engines.

If they are well-written, interesting or catchy, people will click on the title link, click on the site backlink and drive the articles higher in search results. If they are sloppy or dull, people won’t click on them.

Be aware that it can take at least dozens of articles to make an impact. It also takes patience and fine tuning the title, body and resource box if the article doesn’t produce any meaningful impact after several days.

Quantity Versus Quality

Besides learning the process, another consideration for writers is whether to focus on quantity or quality.

Which approach is better? Is it a large number of short and quick articles, or a small number of high-quality articles? There are two schools of thought among article marketers.

One school believes in producing as many short articles as possible in the briefest amount of time. They literally try to write a 400 word article in 20-30 minutes and produce 10 or more a day.

They also will rewrite the same article as much as dozens of times and post it on numerous article sites — or use software to automate the rewrite and post the article throughout the Internet.

This approach probably gains more value from backlinks than from people actually clicking on the link in the resource box.

The second school focuses on quality over quantity. They tend to write longer articles, take more time in writing them and focus on trying to get clickthroughs to their sites from their articles.

Because they take more time, they produce fewer articles and place them on fewer sites. But high quality articles can rank higher in search engine results if the title, body and resource box are good enough and unique enough to attract high readership.

Regardless of the approach, article marketing for SEO is one of the most useful tools in driving Web site audience and improving search engine results.

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