So you've heard that article submissions is a great way to SEO your site but don't know how to do it the right way? There are many things you need to focus on, the first step is to write content for human readers and not for the search engine spiders, web crawlers will eat the content if it is fresh and unique so don't worry too much about them. The following are a good pointers you might want to follow if you are genuinely interested in optimizing your site and building backlinks the right way.

Article Title:

Learning how to write your article title will provide great benefits in your article marketing efforts, catchy article titles or interesting title lines bring in the more hits, for instance writing about the "History of video games" will not bring you as many hits as writing about a game in particular. Another factor you need to keep in mind is that high PR sites look at your title and if you place advertisements on it, you are very likely to be turned down, advertisements include your site name or a call to action. Using an extremely short title will also cause problems because it is very likely other authors have submitted an article with the same keywords, tracking such articles is nearly impossible if you target highly competitive keywords on it.

Article Content:

Basic rules of article submissions is that your content should reach at least 400 words in length, many write 500-700 word articles and have no problems at all. Just like your title, the content shouldn't have any advertisements or calls to action, if it does the ratio should be very small. Some article sites will allow you one or two links in the body but most of them won't so you might want to keep that in mind just in case you are quoting sources. Remember to keep a natural flow which readers will enjoy and make good use of paragraphs, remember that the content you provide will entice visitors to click on your resource box links.

Keyword Density:

This part is widely misunderstood among article writers who have a notion of SEO. Site optimization principles dictate that in order to rank for a specific keyword you have to target a specific set of keywords, which is true and can be easily accomplished if you stay on topic, however many people over do it and use their keywords several times throughout the article copy, this has negative effects because readers will think of you as if you have no more ideas to write about and reading such excerpt would be very odd because everything is repeated over and over. It is important to keep the concepts of article submissions and on page optimization separate. You could write a good excerpt for your site which may have a high keyword density but things are very different with article submissions. The rule of thumb when it comes to article marketing is to never go over 3% KD, in some cases this means that you shouldn't repeat the same keyword or set of keywords more than 9 times throughout the article body.

Resource Box:

This is the most important section of your article and the whole reason why you write unique content for other sites, the resource box will bring visitors to your site if it appeals to the readers, this is the only section of your article where you will be allowed to place advertisements and sale lines which will bring visitors to you. If you are trying to promote yourself as an expert in a particular field you may use your name in the resource box, if on the other hand you are trying to promote your site, the most effective way to do so is to place your site's name in the resource box, this will make it's name stick out and people will be more likely to remember it. The length of this section should not exceed 500 "characters" not "words" so make sure that the HTML view doesn't go over this limit, some sites will allow you longer excerpts, make sure to read their rules.

Anchor Texts:

This is the most important part when it comes to search engine optimization, depending on the keywords and key phrases you use to link to your site certain pages will start to rank for those phrases is the content in your site is relevant to the topic and anchors. Since article sites allow you to use up to 3 links in the resource box you can deep link pages within your site, all of these links are one-way links which have more value than reciprocals. A good practice is to research your keywords with tools such as Wordtracker or Wordze, they will show you what the most effective keywords for your particular niche are as well as the ones which bring the most traffic, once you have a good set of keywords you may focus on their long tail variations which will give you anchor diversity from links coming from different C-classes and IPs.

Write interesting content for humans and follow the rules outlined above for great article marketing and link building results!