Article marketing, as an SEO (search engine optimization) marketing method, has become very popular in the last decade, as of ecommerce on the Internet continues to grow at a rapid pace.

The rising popularity of article marketing however has brought about some negative effects on online content however, as the rapid distribution of online articles via social networks and viral campaigns combined with individuals drafting poor-quality articles as a quick way of achieving promotion, has created a vast online vault of essentially valueless content.

To write original value making content is a more effective way of promoting your website but it does of course require some increased efforts in researching and creating the content. You are, however, more likely to increase visitors to your site if you have something original. You will also benefit from more links to your site if others consider your content is worth linking to.

Search engine rankings basically refer to the order in which web pages are listed in results when you do a search in the search engine. Search engines like Google and Yahoo rank pages that it considers are most relevant and important to the searched keyword.

Getting your website listed in Google? Its relatively easy to get a webpage listed in Google’s index – just point a link to it from an already existing website and you will probably find that you can find your site in the index in a few days, depending on how important the existing website is crawled (large, important information-rich websites get crawled more frequently than smaller, newer site). But getting your website listed in Google’s index is the easy part, its getting it to rank well that is the hard bit, since its only when you appear on the first page of results for a frequently searched for phrase that you are likely to get any significant web traffic. The main rule to consider is that while there are lots of guidelines and common-sense rules, SEO is not a hard science and anyone who trys to tell you it is, and can achieve you a number #1 position for $2500 in a short period are generally not to be trusted.

Consider the fact that Google tweaked its search algorithm over 400 times in 2007 should give you an indication that the Google index is a moving target. Also, there are over 100 criteria used in the sophisticated ranking algorithm used by Google to calculate a web page’s rank, and the weighting factor of each may vary on a constant basis.

The art, or science, of SEO involves attempting to influence that algorithm and basically concerns itself with relevant content and a large number of quality inbound links. The higher a page lists in the search results, the more likely it is to receive a larger number of visitors. For internet marketeers, this increased traffic generally means an increase in sales and profit, and the practise of article marketing is currently one of the most effective methods you can employ to achieve this.