Links within the article are often done on anchor text so that you can feed some targeted link juice towards your website using keywords where you wish to rank. If you write enough articles then you send a powerful stream of anchor text laden links towards your website or web page. Consequently, article marketing proves to be an effective way of getting your website is ranked for your target keywords.

Obviously, there is a time cost in writing the article in the first instance. This has led to an explosion in outsourcing to dedicated content writers who churn out articles specifically designed for submission to article directories. The question you have to ask yourself is whether the cost of these articles will be outweighed by the benefit of these extra links. You only have to look at the number of people who do article marketing to realize that this cost benefit equation is normally favorable towards getting these articles written.

In addition to increasing the number of links to your website for search engine ranking purposes, you are also likely to receive some visitors directly from the article itself. Please note that if the quality of the article is very poor, then you are less likely to receive any visitors from it. This does not require explanation.

Article directories are not the only places where you can submit your article for inclusion. However, some of these article directories are considered authority sites by Google due to the sheer number of visitors they receive and volume of content. Many people will also submit their articles to specialist services where your article may appear on other web site owners’ blogs.

A cause of concern for most marketers is the whole area of “duplicate content”. Many marketers believe that you need to create multiple variations of your article in order to still receive link juice benefits from the search engines. They believe that Google will discount the link juice from identical articles. Generally speaking, many of these article marketers will suggest you need at least 50% unique content for each article. This has led to the concept of a “spun article”.

A spun article is one where words are replaced by synonyms. For example, instead of saying, “I really enjoy sunbathing” you would do something like this: {I|We|They} really {enjoy|like|love} {sunbathing|laying in the sun}. This spun sentence has variations that are randomly chosen when you output the article. One article variation may be I really like sunbathing. Another may be they love playing in the sun. I’m sure you get the idea. By spinning words, sentences or paragraphs you can build up unique variations of the same article. The hope is that once you have submitted these variations, Google will consider each article unique and is therefore supply the full link juice for the anchor text within these articles.

This brief introduction to article marketing covers the very basics. There are many courses available that go into far greater detail but this primer should whet your appetite.