Article marketing is an effective type of Internet marketing tool useful in helping your website achieve higher search engine rankings, which increases awareness of your site. This brings in more traffic to your site, which translates to more money earned. The goal of an effective article marketing strategy is to create high-quality content that is interesting and useful to your target audience. Article marketing can help attract incoming links to your website, as well as build awareness and reputation. It's important to establish a measurable goal before embarking on the article marketing process so you can see how well your campaign is doing and can refine it after a few months.

The first and probably most important step in the article marketing process is to find out the most-searched keywords. There are many tools online that will allow you to type in keyword phrases and list how many times that phrase was searched in the past month. Look for keyword phrases that are popular, but not overly competitive. If many webpages use the same phrase, your website may not end up ranking very high. You also want to choose a phrase that is relevant to your website, since the articles you will be writing will need to include this phrase multiple times.

Once you find relevant keyword phrases, create an outline. Examine the layout of your website and determine how and where you will place the articles. At this time, you also want to brainstorm article ideas using the keyword phrases you chose. This will make your website more organized.

Next, choose your article titles. Titles are often the most important part of your articles because they are the first thing readers see. Plus, they are indexed by search engines, so using keyword phrases in your titles, subtitles and subheads will increase your page rankings and visibility. Make them attention-grabbing by using description, emotion, benefits and other tools that will interest your readers. Don't rush through this step; spend some time formulating titles that will get your readers to choose your website over the millions of others.

The next step in your article marketing strategy is to write useful articles and post them on your website. You should write articles about the products and services you offer on your site. Place these articles around your webpage. You can place article summaries on the sides of your page, along with a link visitors can click to see the full article. This content is all indexed by search engines, making your ranking higher. If visitors are directed to another page within your website, make it easy for them to find their way back to the home page by using the same templates for all webpages.

Following these steps will help your website gain popularity, which will result in more visitors and more business.