Perhaps you have seen ads and promotional material online hyping article writing and submission. Perhaps you have wondered--does that really work? Maybe you have even written a few articles, your web site rose a few notches in the search engines and you wonder if the articles have something to do with it.

Well, I have tried it. Massive-like. I wrote 15 articles and submitted them to as many as 80 different article directories. Within a short period of time, the two web sites I was promoting had pages ranked in the top ten out of literally millions. One web site made it to number one in Yahoo search engine and is still there six months later. Accident? I dont think so. I believe in article marketing.

So how do you do it?

First, write articles about anything related to your web site topic. Make them easy to read, conversational in tone, and limit them to about 500-700 words. For each article, state a problem and answer it, or give a list of helpful hints, or teach someone how to do something.

Next, write a bio about yourself, similar to the one I have at the end of this article. Include a link to your web site. This is the critical part of article marketing. When the search engines pick up your link in the web directory to which you submitted the article, you get credit for having an inbound link. Search engines generally assume that if you have more inbound links than another website, you must have more popularity. Thus, they like to rank you higher in their search engine results.

Next, submit your articles to the various online article directories. Use a search engine to find article directories---there are probably over a thousand of them out there. Submit to as many different directories as possible, to create more links on different web sites.

Of course, you still have to do the normal search engine optimization and all. Make sure your keywords are targeted, your meta-tags are correct, and you have good keyword density and content on your site for the keyword you would like to rank highly for. Keep in mind, too, that it is better to be ranked number 1 for only one site than to have 10 ranked at number 40.