Two of the newest trends for online marketing involves marketing aimed at search engines and article marketing. While search engine marketing helps web sites get ranked higher on search engine results pages, article marketing is more targeted to the customers the site owner is trying to reach. Article marketing does offer hope for those looking for higher rankings on the web site, but the main key is getting the message out to potential customers.

When a customer looks for something on the internet, they type in a word or phrase they believe will lead them to their target. The search engine will take that keyword or phrase and see if it matches anything in its index of previously visited web sites and according to relevance with the search term, will rank the results on its results page. Today's search engines are looking for more than simply matching words or phrases on a web site to those typed in to the search box.

To determine page rankings the search engine will look at relevant information and considers updated textual information contained on the page while indexing a site. Original, informative articles rank high among search engines but, even better they rank higher among the human users who will be making purchases.

For multilevel marketing networks, articles about multilevel marketing will probably not get near the top of a search page for health issues for instance, unless there are articles on the site pertaining to health issues. Additionally, site owners can write informational articles and submit them to article distribution services, which will then make them available to many other sites as well as newsletters and ezine publishers.

If the article offers significant information, these publications will pick them up for use in their publications and first, provides a link to the page listed in the article's signature box and second, that link back is noticed by search engines as a vote of confidence that the site pertains to the keyword phrase used in the article.

Keyword spamming is a common trick that a few companies use to try to trick the search engines into believing they have relevant information to offer. However, article distribution services know this trick as well and will not post these types of articles. Search engines are also getting smarter and have learned to ignore these articles and humans who happen to stumble onto a site by way of a spammed keyword article will generally be upset and will not return to the site.

While concept of article marketing is still in its infancy there remains many questions about the type of articles a site owner should publish and how many to submit to distribution services. There is no magic number or frequency, however most recommendation call for at least two to three articles every week, for different pages on a web site, with the links in the signature block pointing to the relevant web page. If the site owner lacks the writing skills they can hire a ghost writer to pen the articles and then submit them to the distribution services under their name and signature block.