Lets go over the theory behind article marketing. What is it actually all about. Here goes. You write articles, you submit them to article directories. Voila you get backlinks and provide fresh quality content for the search engines to pick up quickly, list and rank high. Sounds easy enough right. Well it is that easy however there is a few things to know in order to efficiently do this and take full advantage of the power of using articles to provide backlinks and drive traffic to your site.

First you write a keyword optimized article for your website. Lets say you have a website about tropical fish. You want to drive traffic to that site and create mega backlinks in the process.

Before we even start to write the article you to want to pick 2 or 3 keywords that you are going to use often throughout the article. These keywords are what you want to rank high with for search phrases. There are a couple ways to find the best keywords to use. Lets look at a couple of free resources you can use

http://inventory.overture.com/

http://www.goodkeywords.com/

Now what we want to do here to find the best keyword to target is to find the lowest competition in the search engines but with a highly searched term. Lets type in the keyword ?tropical fish? into google search with the quotes. You will see there is something like 7,390,000. That is a lot of competition. Now if you check in overture or goodkeywords you will see that it was searched 77268 times.

This is how we check and see if this would be a good keyword to use. 7,390,000 websites competing divide by 77,268 times searched, equals 95.641 rounded. What you are looking for in the result is the lowest number possible. The lower the final result the less competition for that keyword.

Lets do the same thing with the keyword ?tropical fish aquarium. At the time of writing this report I found this keyword has 87,100 sites competing in google and it was searched for 5110 times. After we do the math we will find a number like 17.06. Much less competition for that keyword than ?tropical fish. Therefore that is the main keyword we are going to target in the article you write. What you want to do is target the lowest competition keyword possible but at the same time use the keyword you originally wanted. What I mean by that is if we wanted to target ?tropical fish? but we use the keyword ?tropical fish aquarium? you are still targeting both but you have a fighting chance picking up much more traffic using ?tropical fish aquarium? due to less competition fighting for that keyword.

You still will want to find at least 1 more keyword to target in your article as well. When writing the article you don't want to flood it with the keywords that you found to be the best to use. If you use that keyword about 1 time per 100 words, that would be sufficient. Don't over do it and flood the article by using the same keyword 3 times or more per 100 words. That will do more harm that good both for the reader and the search engines. The keywords you chose have to look natural in the article for best results.

When writing your article try to aim for 500 words. Every article directory is different but if you keep to around 400-700 word area you should be fine for most article directories out there.

That's the basics to writing an article that will get th best possible rank in the search engines for particular search phrases.