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. 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 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 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.