If you decide to use article marketing as part of your promotional strategy then you need to understand the importance of having the right keywords in your article. In order to find the right keywords for your products or services, you need to do some keyword research.

Keyword research involves finding the most popular search term that internet surfers use when they are looking for the goods and services that you are trying to promote. Researching the right keywords or search terms can take a bit of time, but it's time well spent.

Once you have found out how popular a particular keyword or key phrase is, you then have to see how competitive that keyword is, as you don't want to spend a lot of time researching keywords that no-one is using. The other thing to bear in mind is that if your keyword or phrase shows that there are millions of searches for that particular term, it will be difficult to get your site ranked for that particular word or phrase.

Juggling things like keyword popularity against competitiveness is often referred to by SEO specialists as the keyword effectiveness indicator. The keyword effectiveness indicator is a way of deciding whether your site will rank for a particular word or phrase.

The more effective your keyword or phrase seems to be, the more likely it is that your site will rank well for that keyword. Once you have done the keyword research and found a term that's used in a fair number of searches without being overly popular, then you have an idea of what keywords you should be using in your article.

Good keyword research is vital if your article marketing efforts are worth the money and time that goes into it.

Keywords are important in article marketing because these are the terms that readers are more likely to click on in the article, and which lead them to your website. You need to take some care over how you use your keywords in the article, don't stuff it because Google really doesn't approve of keyword stuffing. The article needs to be readable, give some information or insight on things that are related to your product or services.

When you use article marketing, you are allowed a certain number of links back to your site within the article, you need to check article directory rules on this because they do differ. The keyword becomes the anchor text in your article, i.e. the word that is highlighted in the text that readers may click on, and that links back to your site. You will also want to use the anchor text in your resource box, the box that holds your personal information, for readers to click on.