Article marketing is an important component of external SEO, or search engine optimization. Irrespective of how much internal SEO is carried out on a web page, article marketing can make a massive difference, not only to the traffic to your site, but also your link density and search engine listing.

The term ?web page? is used deliberately, since most search engines list individual pages and the Google PageRank applies to web pages rather than domains, or complete ?web sites?. Each page has to be optimized separately, and you can use article marketing to achieve that.

This is done by means of your ?resource box? that some people called your ?bio?. Most article directories allow you to say a little about yourself and provide one or two URLs. This separate area can come in three different forms: either a separate resource box, that is generally included at the bottom of the article, a separate paragraph that you are allowed to add to the bottom of the article, or an author's ?bio? that can be read if the reader clicks on your name that is an active link to the bio.

If none of these are allowed, then you are advised to give the directory a miss, since the whole purpose of article marketing has nothing to do with giving away free information, but with trying to persuade readers to click on your links and visit your site, and also have your link visible on the directory to provide you with a link back to your website, and so add to your page rank votes. The higher your page rank, the more relevant the search engines will calculate your page to be.

Even the third type of link mentioned above is not really acceptable to most article marketers, since the best place for a link is at the end of the article when the reader is still in a state of anticipation of more information. For this to occur your article has to provide good information about the subject but not so much that the reader requires no further information and has therefore no need to click to visit your website for more.

The wording of your resource box is also very important and there are a number of possibilities according to the type of article and the purpose of your website. You can simply state that ?More information on - - - - - can be found at http://xxxxx.com?. On the other hand, it is often better to say a bit more such as ?Peter has a vast knowledge of this subject and uses it to get quick listing on Google and Yahoo. Find our how he does it on http://yyyyy.com?.

Use your imagination and you can increase the return of each of your articles in terms of clicks straight to your site or, if your article is good enough, the reader might even want to copy it as content on their own website, and this provides you with more back links. If you combine this with good on-site SEO and other methods of off-site search engine optimization, then article marketing can be a very powerful tool that can be used not only to attract direct clicks to your site but also to create valuable links back to selected pages on your website.