Article marketing, as an SEO (search engine optimization) marketing method, has become very popular in the last decade, as of ecommerce on the Internet continues to grow at a rapid pace.

The circulation of online articles via social networks and viral campaigns has become a very quick, and therefore popular way of promoting online markets. This rapid popularity of marketing however has had a negative effect on on-line content however, since individuals writing poor-quality articles as a quick way of achieving promotion has swamped the world wide web in virtually valueless content.

To write original value making content is a more effective way of promoting your website but it does of course require some increased efforts in researching and creating the content. You are, however, more likely to increase visitors to your site if you have something original. You will also benefit from more links to your site if others consider your content is worth linking to.

A search engine ranking basically means where your web page comes in the list of results you get when someone does a search for a particular phrase. Search engines like Google return to you the pages that it considers to be most relevant to that keyword and which are also considered the most important are listed in descending order in the search results.

Getting your website listed in Google? Its relatively easy to get a webpage listed in Google’s index – just point a link to it from an already existing website and you will probably find that you can find your site in the index in a few days, depending on how important the existing website is crawled (large, important information-rich websites get crawled more frequently than smaller, newer site). But getting your website listed in Google’s index is the easy part, its getting it to rank well that is the hard bit, since its only when you appear on the first page of results for a frequently searched for phrase that you are likely to get any significant web traffic. The main rule to consider is that while there are lots of guidelines and common-sense rules, SEO is not a hard science and anyone who trys to tell you it is, and can achieve you a number #1 position for $2500 in a short period are generally not to be trusted.

If you think about the fact that Google reportedly tweaked its search engine algorithm 400 times in 2007 should clearly tell you that the Google index is a moving target. Also, we know that there are about 100 criteria used in the Google ranking algorithm and that this is changing all the time as Google seek to supply you with the most useful results and cut away all the spam and duplicated data.

Search engine optimization (SEO) concerns itself with the order in which webpages get ranked when keywords or phrases are searched for in search engines. More specifically, it is concerned with how you might promote a page to rank higher than its ‘competitors’ by using various techniques. The higher a page is ranked, the more likely that page will draw a greater number of site visitors. For company websites, increased traffic often leads to increased sales, and article marketing has proven to be useful and effective in helping achieve this for many.