And why is this? Because of the emphasis Google and other search engines are not only putting on articles as web page content, but also because they are looking upon article directories as excellent sources of good content, and an article on a good directory is worth its weight in gold in terms of link popularity.

To Google, link popularity is a measure of how relevant and important your web page is to the keyword it is based upon, and therefore an important aspect of the optimization of your web page for a high listing in search engine results pages for your keyword. The important term here, then, is 'keyword'.

The Importance of Keyword Research in Article Marketing

Without the right keyword, your article might never be read: at least not read by potential visitors, and when those you are not targeting reach your resource box then they will either not click on your link, or if they do your landing page will be irrelevant to them and they will just click away. Finding the right keyword is one of the best website promotion techniques available to you.

It is important in article marketing, therefore, that having decided upon the topic of your article, you find out the best keywords to use with it. You can choose keywords in three different ways:

a) The most popular, so that you have a large number of people seeking your keyword, b) The one with least supply, so that your competition is as low as possible, or c) A combination of each so that you have an average demand with as low a supply as possible.

Although most keyword courses will tell you that the third option is best, it actually depends upon what you are using the keyword for. It is absolutely correct that you should choose a keyword with maximum demand and minimum supply to use on a web page, where you are competing with every other web page on the internet providing the same type of information. However, such keywords are no longer easy to find, and although they are there if your dig deeply enough, you often have a decision to make.

Long-tail Keywords

For web page purposes it is frequently more profitable to seek a large number of what are known as 'long-tail' keywords, consisting of several words (in internet parlance a keyphrase of 5 words is nevertheless still referred to as a 'keyword'). Each of these keywords or phrases can then be given a web page to itself, as opposed to one web page for a more popularly used keyword. However, you will tend to get most of those using these terms to find information about your niche.

You could easily end up with more visitors to your website than if you designed one page for a more popular keyword, but with a lot of competing web pages so that you get only a very small proportion of that traffic to your site.

Article Marketing Provides two Sources of Traffic

With articles, however, you have two sources of traffic. One is from organic search engine searches, as a result of which your article could appear high in the listings. This is because the directory pages that hold your articles are themselves scanned by Google and other engines, and can themselves be listed. In such cases, you should be seeking competitive keywords, so that you have the most users but with the fewest other websites offering the same keyword.

However, the second is the article directory itself, and in spite of what you might read some trying to tell you, article directories are read by many people. Those that say nobody reads the articles on the directories are talking tosh because I can have any of my articles read by over 2000 people over the directories I submit to. 150 reads is common on Article Avenue, and I can get even more on Ezine Articles. It's probably a lot more than 2000 over the 100 or so directories, ezines and emails addresses to which my articles are submitted.

What I am coming to is that article directories have their own search boxes that people use to find articles on their niche, and that is where you need to use the most popular keywords, and not the most competitive. In this case, it is demand that counts and not how many other web pages are using the same keyword. Website promotion involves an understanding of the medium you are using.

Article Keywords are of Two Types

So, to finish up, choose a keyword for your article that has massive demand, irrespective of supply, and another that has a good balance between supply and demand - at best lots of supply and no demand (though you won't find that it is the Nirvana).

But you get the idea: cater for both the search engine listings for your article and also the terms that the directory users will use when searching for articles. If you can optimize both by the right choice of keywords, your articel can drive masses of traffic to the web page of your choice. Improve your website promotion techniques by learning how to write articles using the right keywords and you will make the most of article marketing to your benefit.