Probably THE most powerful combination of marketing techniques online.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the collective term for a number of methods that can be used to attract search engines to your website and persuade them that your web content is more relevant than others are to the search term used by somebody seeking the information that you can provide.

Article marketing, incorrectly called bum marketing by some people, is a means of expressing the benefits of what you do to others, and of advertising specific pages on your site. A well written article can help other people to learn more about your subject, but can also provide a link to other pages on your website that can provide further information to anybody that requires it.

An article submission should not be an advert, but provide more information. It can also advertise your website or individual web pages, indirectly through reference to it in the author's resource box. There is a distinct difference between an advert and advertising, although it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two. For example, you can be a good advert for your educational system without actually advertising it. It is a matter of semantics, and semantics is something that you should learn about if you want to be successful in getting good listings on search engines, especially on Google.

That is because of Google's so-called ?latent semantic indexing? algorithm, or LSI, that evaluates the content of a web page through the relevance of its semantics to the keyword for which the page has been optimized. LSI is wrongly named, since it should be LSA, or ?latent semantic analysis?, but it is all semantics!!

The application of SEO and Article Marketing together on the same web page can have a very powerful influence on the search engine listing of your page. It is a synergistic effect, and in order to use that effect it is essential to understand both. That is only possible by becoming familiar with each, not in theory, and not only in relation to their individual effects on each of your website pages, but also with respect to your articles.

When you write articles for publication or submission to article directories, then each article should be written as you would write an individual web page for your site. The article should be able to slot perfectly into your website without seeming out of place, and be able to be listed in its own right on Google, Yahoo and the other search engines such as MSN and Ask as a web page on the article directories on which it has been published.

It is impossible to teach SEO and bum marketing (I hate that term) together in an article such as this, and to try to do so would only confuse you. In any case, such tuition should be carried out only in combination with tuition in article marketing techniques, and the correct way to write articles and use content not only for your own benefit but also to provide useful information to your readers that they can use to better their own opportunities to make money online.