Search engine optimization (SEO) is important on your web site - but you already knew that, right? But did you know that search engine optimization is also an important part of your article marketing, vis-a-vis the articles that you will distribute and submit to the various article directories too? You must keep SEO in mind during all of your article marketing efforts!

You may think that the only part that article marketing plays in search engine optimization is that it provides numerous one-way back links to your websites, blogs and affiliate promotions. While this does help in the optimization of your own sites to an extent, there is more to it than that. You want your articles to become as viral as possible - and performing search engines optimization on your articles accomplishes this feat in two very important ways.

First, when your article is search engine friendly, using keywords that you hope to target in the search engines, it is more likely to appear higher up in the search engine results when those keywords are searched. Furthermore, when people do searches at the article directories using your keywords, your articles should come up better in those results as well. Search engine optimization and article marketing really must go hand-in-hand at all times!

Second, there are hundreds of thousands of people building AdSense sites. They want articles that cause specific types of AdSense ads to appear on their site. An article with the right search engine optimization accomplishes this, which means that more of these publishers will want to use your articles on their site - and that wider exposure can boost your article marketing results significantly.

Unfortunately, most online marketers don't understand the importance of making their articles search engine friendly - and even if they do, they aren't sure how to achieve sufficient search engine optimization in their article marketing efforts. Many sites and e-books go into long, complicated explanations, but it is really quite simple.

First, use your keyword phrase in the title of your article. This is extremely important. Next determine the keyword density that you want to use. Experts say that a keyword density of 2% - 5% is good. This means that 2% or more of your article should contain your keyword phrase. So if your article is 500 words long, your keyword phrase should appear at least 10 times (500 x 2% = 10). So your keyword phrase should be used twice in the first paragraph, six times in the body of the article, and twice in the last paragraph.

Article marketing is one of the most powerful ways to promote your web sites and your blogs, and to drive targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing links. Hopefully your on-site search engine optimization is already bringing you in solid levels of targeted traffic from the major search engines, and now you know to keep off-site search engine optimization foremost in your mind when you next sit down to your article marketing tasks!