Everyone wants to get their site to rank higher in the search engine results. Whether you want friends and family to find the pictures of your kids you've uploaded or you plan to make money on your site from visiting customers, you want people to visit your site. How can they visit it if they can't find it? Search Engine Optimization (SEO), in its simplest form, is doing things that help more people find your site and, ultimately, drive more traffic to it.

Ask 10 people and you'll get 10 different opinions on what things you can do to optimize your site, move it up in the search engine rankings and increase your site traffic. Although the search engines are constantly changing their minds on what's important, the 3 top things just about anyone will agree you should focus on are to: 1) Optimize your site "technically" using proper layout, meta tags...etc. 2) Have fresh, relevant, keyword-rich content on your site. Ever heard the old adage "content is king"...exactly. 3) Develop a linking campaign to get relevant, one-way, inbound links back to your site. While the technical requirements are an entire discussion in and of itself, and outside the scope of this article, the use of some of the basic concepts in article marketing can help you cover the bases with respect to both content and your linking campaign.

Article marketing, through the use of article directories, offer webmasters/publishers virtually unlimited content to use on their sites. You can find keyword-rich content on just about any subject, regardless of how obscure of a niche your site may be focused on. In addition, with the volume of content out there, a person with even mediocre writing skills can cull the various articles and develop their own completely unique article.

Throw in the 3rd element, a good linking campaign, and you're well on your way to website traffic success. Article directories not only let you use their content for your own site but they let you submit your articles for placement on their sites as well. In the resource box within your article, article directories let you give a brief bio of yourself and let you place a link back to the site you're trying to promote. Each article submission you make to an article directory is an additional backlink to your site. Obviously, it's in your best interest to submit your article to as many article directories as possible since every one of those links you have linking back to your site helps boost the ranking of your site.

Article marketing also takes advantage of "viral marketing". Remember the webmasters/publishers we talked about earlier. They're going to come to the article directories looking for fresh content. When they find your article and put it on their site (with your embedded link), you'll get another backlink. Now, imagine that instead of 1 publisher picking up your article for their site, that 10 or 100 or 1,000 pick it up. The better your article, the more people will be interested in it and the better chance of it spreading...like a virus.