The best article in the world will be read by a global audience and make its author rich.

But maybe not in the way you think...

To understand why, you need to know why people write ezine articles. There are some kind souls out there who write purely to inform, bless em. There are others who write for the thrill of seeing their name up on the internet. But the vast majority of article writers write articles as a means of promoting websites.

You see, it's not about having your articles read, it's about getting them published. If you look at the bottom of any article, you'll see a resource box. And in that box you'll see links to websites. Those links are important because of the way Google and other search engines rank sites.

Whenever you type a query into a search engine, it has to decide which pages to return in its results, and in which order. A big part of that ordering process is a site's popularity. And popularity is judged in terms of links - the more sites link to yours, the more popular it's judged to be, and the higher its place in the rankings.

Articles are a great way to get links, as many webmasters are either not inclined or just not able to write their own content. Article sites are a great free resource for them, and a great method of gaining links for the author. It's a win-win situation!

So the best article in the world is the article that gets picked up by every webmaster in the world and published on their sites, gaining the author millions of backlinks and pushing his promoted site to the top of the rankings.

Which begs the question: What are the elements of the best article in the world?

Number one - and by far the most important - is a great title. Think about how you found this article. Reading it, you may feel a little bit cheated. You were expecting to read the best article in the world, but now find yourself in the midst of a search engine ranking / content providing debate. If I'd called it 'The advantages of article writing in gaining top positions in search engines' would you be here?

Number two is good content. Ok, I've cheated you a little in getting you to read this article, but you're still reading, aren't you?! Actually, content isn't that important. The fact that this article was published is enough. Sorry.

Number three is the promoted links. You may never read the resource box at the bottom of this article, but it's there, like a little Trojan horse, sending links back to my site. What's important is the way I present them. Google is all about 'anchor text' - the words used to describe the link. My job is to link pages using the text that people will type into the search engines. For example, if my website has a page called 'page14', there's no point getting a link to it in that way as no-one will ever search for 'page14'. If that page is about green tomatoes, then I'll use that as the anchor text. Linking pages with a variety of natural-sounding and popular anchor text is a real skill, and explains why successful SEO experts get paid so well for their services.

The best article in the world has yet to be written. This is just a tribute.