There are many ways to market your business on the Internet, and using search engine optimized articles has to be one of the "keeper" strategies for getting pre-qualified 'natural' search engine traffic to your web site.

Now, I'm sure you've heard all this before, "people search the Internet looking to information (aka articles) on how to solve a particular problem". People just don't search the web to buy your 'stuff'!

If you truly understand this search "path" then you understand the meat and potatoes of how the web works, it's an information resource for people.

To completely understand the above concept 'follow the money'. Search engines need content to be able to rank web sites, so that they continually get searchers BACK to their engines. The more searchers they have searching for relevant content on a search engine means more revenue for that search engine (e.g. the success of Google adsense).

This is why blogs and RSS have become the "buzz". Blogs and RSS make the content (copy, words) "fluid"... meaning that the content changes often. This means that the search engine bots love these technologies, visit more often, and then rank the content well (if the blog articles are keyword optimized).

To see how this works go to any news site. News sites have a volume of ever-changing content. For example CNN gets spidered (visited) by the Googlebot something like 28,0000 times a day.

Why? Because of CNN's ever changing content, and I guess the 'bots' are 'lazy'? They go to where the good, and changing content is more often.

The SEO aspect of article writing.

Think of SEO as "filing". What I mean by this is that good search engine optimization strategies help the search engine to "file" your content appropriately. Good keyword analysis gives you the information to enable the search engine bot with the 'right' filing.

There are no smoke and mirror tactics here. Your Mother was right when she told you that 'telling the truth is always better in the long run'. This principle especially applies to good SEO practice.

Now, how do we take this concept of "fluid", search engine optimized content and turn it into a Links IN bonanza for your own web site (thus sending your rankings through the roof over time, so to speak)?

These are the core principles...

1. Ensure that the link for your article is on a web page hosted on a unique IP address.

2. Ensure that the link for your article is on a web page that has a unique, wholly independent set of backlinks.

3. Ensure that the link is on a web page that is at least loosely relevant to the topic of your own web site.

You see, it's not just a matter of having your articles on just any article directory. Your articles need to be in a category (and preferably a specialist directory) that is within "theme'. In other words you would never post your article on 'looking after your cattle dog" on a directory that was focused on Financial Management.

In addition to placing your articles on article directories one can also run your articles on press release service sites, and of course there are RSS strategies (but that's a whole other story, and another article).