The use of back-links to improve a websites Search Engine Rank Position (SERP) in search engines (SE) has been very effective in diffusing some level of black-hat search engine optimization (SEO). Black-hat SEO involves using "illegal" techniques with the express purpose of fooling SEs to rank a website favorably. Back-links on the other hand are hyper-text links from other websites that link and direct their visitors to your website. They are also referred to as incoming links.



An everlasting question on an internet marketers mind is how they could get other websites to link back to their website. The more the number of links, the higher the website's Page Rank (PR) and most likely the better the SERP. The better the SERP the more visitors the website attracts, and the more the visitors the more sales the site can make.

One such technique is article marketing. It is so called as it uses reprintable articles to market your website. The driving force of the internet as a whole is information often referred to as content. Consequently, SEs love content, more so new, unique and/or frequent content. Article marketing targets to satisfy this insatiable need of SEs and webmasters.

An article is a literary composition on a distinct and independent subject such as the one you are reading. This is as opposed to series, book, or other such literary works. The idea in article marketing is to compose on a subject related to your website. For example for a tours and travel website one could compose an article about giving tips on dealing with jetlag or choosing a family safari. Ideally, the article should be more than 500 words but less than 1500. You then make the article available for reprint by any other webmaster. They can choose to use it on their websites, blogs or publish it on their newsletters.

The trick behind getting a link back to your website from the websites' whose owners choose to use the article is in the resource box. A resource boxes is a widely acceptable format of including hyper-linked text at the end of your article with a little marketing message. It is usually a sentence or two. In here you should add a link pointing to your website. As reprint content, an interested webmaster is only allowed to use the content as is, they can neither change the content nor the resource box.

Each website that uses your article automatically gives you a back-link. Highly informative content tends to attract wider publishing by other webmasters.