Article marketing is a website seo strategy designed to get free targeted traffic to your website. It works by writing and submitting your original articles related to your niche to the article directories. Webmasters and ezine publishers can download these articles and use them freely as long as they keep your resource bio information at the bottom of the article intact including live links. A well written article that uses the proper keywords that are often searched for can attract a lot of free website traffic to your site.

In addition to gaining traffic from click-throughs and free searches, article marketing can help to bring your website's page rank up because it provides relevant one-way back links to your site which is a factor search engines use to calculate popularity.

The first step to article marketing success starts with the article itself. The article needs to be well written, easy to read and focused on the topic of interest you wish to promote. If you write an article on a topic that is unrelated to your website business, you may get curious visitors but they will not be targeted. On the other hand if your article is related to your website in any way, readers who click on your link are probably looking for more information. Therefore, they are much more likely to be interested in the products or services you are promoting.

The first step to article marketing success is to choose an attention grabbing title that includes your keyword. People searching on your keywords are far more likely to find your article than otherwise. The title of your article needs to attract a person that wants to read the article itself.

The article content is the most important aspect of article marketing. The content needs to be relevant, informative and useful. It also needs to keep your attention. The whole purpose of the article is to hold the reader's attention for the entire article and impress them enough that they will want to click on your link in the resource box.

The article should also be written with internet marketing SEO (search engine optimization) in mind. Keywords and terms with a similar meaning (to appeal to latent semantic indexing) should be dotted throughout the article. Use your keyword in the first one hundred words of the article, in the last one hundred words and a few times in the body of the article. Keyword density should be kept in the 1-2% range if possible.

You also need to peak your readers' interest so that they are more likely to click on your link in the resource box. An excellent way to increase click-throughs to your website is to divide your article into two parts. Submit the first part to the article directories of your choice and keep part 2 on your own website. On your own site you can insert links in the article which can take the reader to other information on the site.

To succeed in article marketing over the long term you need to submit original, interesting articles regularly to high traffic articles directories such as Top Rank articles. If you are consistent and conscientious and follow the strategies in this article, you will find that article marketing is a highly effective method for website promotion.