Online marketing has two new trends that involve marketing aimed at search engines and article marketing. Search engine marketing will help web sites get ranked higher with the search engine results pages and article marketing is targeted more to the customers the site owners want to reach. For those looking for higher rankings on the web site article marketing does offer hope, but the main key is to get the message out to all potential customers.

Customers type in a word or phrase they believe will lead them to their target when they are looking for something on the internet. That keyword or phrase will then be taken by the search engine to see if it matches anything in the index of previously visited web sites and according to the relevance of the search term, will rank the results on its results page. Rather than simple matching words or phrases on a web site to those typed in a search box, todays search engines are looking for more.

The search engine will look at relevant information and considers updated textual information contained on the page when they index a site to determine page rankings. While original, informative articles rank high among search engine, they will also rank even higher among the human users who are going to be making the purchases.

Articles about multi level marketing will probably not get near the top of a search page for health issues unless there are articles on the site pertaining to health issues, for instance. In addition, site owners are allowed to write informational articles and submit them to article distribution services which makes them available to many other sites in addition to newsletters and ezine publishers.

These publications will pick up the articles for use in their publications if it offers significant information and first provides a link to the page listed in the articles signature box and second that link back is noticed by search engines as a vote of confidence that the site pertains to the keyword phrase used in the article.

A common trick that a few companies use to try to trick the search engines into believing that they have relevant information to offer is keyword spamming. Although article distribution services know this trick well and do not post these types of articles. Search engines are also increasing in their intelligence and they have learned to ignore these articles. Humans who may be able to stumble into a site with spammed keyword articles will also be upset and will not want to return to the site.

The concept of article marketing is still in its infancy since there remains many questions about the type of articles that site owners should publish and how they can be submitted to distribution services. Most recommendations call for at least two to three articles every week, for different pages on a web site, with the links in the signature block pointing to the relevant web page, but there is not specific number or frequency. If the site owner doesn't want to write their own articles they can hire a ghost write to pen the articles for them and then submit them to the distribution services under their own name and signature block.