An excellent way of driving free quality traffic to your site is using article marketing. Article marketing is the process of writing an article on a topic and submitting the article to article directories. People can then read and publish your article on their own sites which gives your article more exposure and in the process promotes the site or product you have mentioned in the article.



Another huge advantage of article marketing is that google loves these article directories. Google would much rather show a user generated article then display some ecommerce site that is filled with advertisements. This makes it possible for you to write an article and have it appear on the first page of a google search by targeting specific keywords.

To find out what keywords you should be targetting when using article marketing you need to do some keyword research. You want to use keywords that people are searching alot. There are quite a few keyword research tools available. A good free tool is http://www.seobook.com/general/keyword. A search of ‘keyword research' in google also returns many helpful links.

With article marketing you want to only target keywords that are getting over 2000 searches per month. Once you find these keywords you need to determine how much competition there is. Depending on how much competition there is will affect how easily you can get your article to show on the first page of google.

Take the keyword you have chosen and enter it into google with surrounding quotation marks. By enclosing your keyword in quotation marks you are telling google to show sites that match that phrase and not bits and peices of the phrase. If the number of web pages returned for the keyword is less then 10,000 then its a good keyword to target with article marketing.

There is a formula that you need to follow in order to have the right amount of keywords in your article to be successful with article marketing. The title of your article needs to contain your keyword. For every 100 words you should have 3 occurances of your keyword. So if an article was 1000 words you would have 30 occurances of your keyword. You also want to finish your article with your keyword. For example if your keyword was ‘american muscle cars', you could close the article with “and thats my article about american muscle cars”.

At the very bottom of the article there is usually a place where you can enter some text about the author of the article. In that text you want to have a link back to your website or squeeze page and that link needs to have the keyword as the clickable text for the link.

Its important in article marketing not to saturate your article with too many occurances of your keywords. You can get penalised if you start putting 5 keywords per 100 words instead of 3 keywords per 100 words.

Below are some good article directory sites which I have used and experienced great results with:

* http://www.ezinearticles.com

* http://www.goarticles.com

* http://www.isnare.com

* http://www.articlealley.com

Its important to remember in article marketing your article must be interesting and contain good information. You want people to finish reading your article and have enjoyed it. If you win over the reader then you have a far higher chance of the reader clicking on your site or affiliate link.

I hope this article has shown you one of the effective ways you can drive free traffic to your site using article marketing.