Article marketing is a vital part of any website promotion strategy. The articles that are published by directories bring qualified traffic to your site. A well-written, informative article helps to build your credibility in your subject area. The active links in the article resource box effectively help to optimize your site for the search engines.

Writing and submitting articles to article directories is an ongoing task that should be performed at least weekly. Each article that is approved and published by an article directory is only "hot" for a day or two. This is because it will end up on the "latest articles" pages which receive more traffic than the category pages. A new article will typically remain in Google's primary search results for only a week or two before it's banished to the supplementary index. Keep in mind that most articles submitted in bulk to many directories will be viewed as duplicate content and end up in the supplemental index.

For this reason, it is important to submit articles on a regular, frequent basis. If you submit one article a week, then you will always have a few articles that are in the primary index and getting more readers. It is also important to promote these articles while they are still "hot". Submitting and getting approved by article directories is not enough. You can combine the promotional method of article marketing with the explosive growth of social bookmarking sites.

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious and Technorati are designed to allow users to bookmark and share their favorite web pages. Instead of just bookmarking a page in your "Favorites" folder on your computer, you can publish a link online so that you and others can easily view that page. Bookmarked pages can be articles, blogs, static, or dynamic web pages (like an ebay product page). Bookmarking your article in various directories increases the number of people that are exposed to your article.

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg often have very loyal followers who visit at least daily. They click through on any headline that may interest them so that they can read the full story. Once a reader clicks through and reads your published article, he or she may choose to click your active hyperlink to visit your website. So these bookmarking sites can bring you indirect, but qualified traffic.

Equally important is the seo value of these links. The more links an article has pointing to it, the better it will rank in the search results. Let's say you have an article published on "The Ten Most Fuel Efficient Vehicles of 2007" which you have bookmarked on five popular sites. This article will now rank higher than other similar articles with fewer backlinks. So if a person is looking for information on the most fuel efficient vehicles, your article is more likely to show up higher in the search results.

Most article directories have a bookmarking tool or Digg buttons to allow readers who enjoy your article to add it to their favorite online bookmarks. However, you can use these tools to promote your own articles. Start off by signing up for an account with the most popular and suitable bookmarking communities. Then bookmark your best articles to each of the sites. Hopefully, others will enjoy your articles and promote them even further by voting for them.

On its own, article marketing is an excellent way to promote your site and improve your search engine optimization. Taking advantage of the viral nature of social bookmarking allows you to increase the scope of your audience and ultimately, bring more qualified prospects to your site.