Article marketing is nothing but free advertisement for your website. Irrespective of the fact that you spend time to write the article like a pro, put in actual information and give away some part of your own knowledge with every article you write, article marketing remains nothing but a method of promotion. And the promotion is effectuated by making the search engines display your article highly on their search pages, so that people may visit the article, and through that, your website.

Naturally, the whole success of the article marketing campaign depends upon the way the search engines look at your articles. Today, there are three important search engines that count, Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Among them, they transact 90% of all search-related activities on the Internet.

All three of these search engines have different criteria for ranking web pages. For this reason, an article that has shown highly on the Google search engine might be totally absent on Yahoo!. For this reason, it is very difficult to have a website optimized for all three search engines. However, there are some common features which can be worked upon.

Such common features which help to rank an article higher on all three of the leading search engines are enlisted below:-

(i)Make proper use of the keyword, The first thing that counts is naturally the density of the keyword in the article. You can select the right keyword with one of the several keyword tracker tools available. A keyword tracker will give you suggestions about keywords people search for more. Select the one that has been searched for the highest number of times. Then include this keyword at least once per hundred words of your text. This is a very assured way of getting a good page rank.

(ii)Choose the best heading, Your heading should contain the keyword. This will enhance the chances of the article showing in the front pages of the search engines. If possible, put the keyword in the beginning of the heading. So, if your keyword is Holiday Packages in Bahamas, the title 'Holiday Packages in Bahamas, Some Good Options' is much better than 'How to select good Holiday Packages in Bahamas'.

(iii)Use more text, less graphics, All three websites will rank your page depending on the amount of content that is present in it. So, if you use more text (with the keyword in it, of course) and lesser images, it will perform better. Images and media files are actually garbage for the search engines. They will simply make the ranking process more difficult. Go easy on the graphics.

(iv)Duplicate articles, Yes, this is a legitimate thing to do if you are submitting the articles to the free directories. Free directories accept articles that have been already submitted elsewhere, but do not feel tempted to copy paste the same article.

Take some time out to rework some portions of the text. This will certainly improve your chances on the web pages. You might actually find all your articles from the different directories on the web pages.

Remember that search engines are software programs. As such, they work with the intelligence bestowed upon them by the programmer. It is extremely possible to work around this intelligence and get the best results from your articles. That would be the success of the article marketing campaign.