The primary reason so many people write articles today is to create backlinks to their websites or the websites they are optimising for clients.

This does work to a degree; however, it is really the lowest form of backlink you can obtain.

Search Engines base the way they rank a website on a number of factors, the first on the content the site has available and the second on how relevant the site may be.

If a site has many backlinks, search engines “Think” the site has a high relevancy and will rank it highly.

Unfortunately, many people doing SEO think that this all they have to do get their website to the top of the search engines is to obain as many backlinks as possible.

When they don't see the results they expected they are flummoxed and can't understand why their SEO efforts are not working.

The reason why this does not work is because search engines know that the backlinks are not of any quality and will not put any value on them when ranking a website.

Thus, the site will not rank highly.

To put it bluntly, article backlinks are in the most part rubbish, and hardly count for anything. Period.

To achieve a good raking in the Search Engine results you would need to write thousands and thousands of articles, if this was your main way of gaining backlinks.

There are much better ways of obtaining backlinks while trying to do SEO.

The most effective form of SEO is Viral Marketing also know as link baiting, this involves people linking to your website usually through their blogs.

The benefit of link baiting is that once it gets some momentum it will grow itself as opposed to writing articles and submitting them to say ten article directories.

While your article directories will only give you ten backlinks, people blogging about your site and the word spreading may give you over a hundred. The benefit is the backlinks also come from a variety servers as opposed to the same old ten article directory servers.

The search engines will rank your site much higher if your backlinks come from many places.

You can create a viral marketing campaign by getting in contact with individual bloggers and offering them your product for review. Once you get a number of positive reviews, word will spread and you will have a successful SEO backlink campaign. If you are too lazy to contact individual bloggers there are a number of sites out there where you can pay bloggers to blog about your site.

Always get them to include a backline back to your site though.