After being a website owner for a while, you soon become convinced that article marketing is one of the most cost effective marketing strategies to enhance the visibility of your website on the internet. Article marketing promotes your knowledge, expertise and enhances your position in search engine results.

You will find lots of material that explains the importance of article marketing. However, this article is not about article marketing, it is about how to make your articles serve your marketing efforts in a better way.

Article directories usually receive tens, hundreds or maybe thousands of articles every day. They usually sort these articles by the date of submissions. What this means for you is that your article soon after submission will be stacked with thousands of other articles and therefore lowers the chances for your article to be read.

Furthermore, most of the article marketers usually submit their articles to more than one article directory in hopes to get more backlinks to their website. Is this good or not? This is beyond the scope of this article! However, it is very well known for webmasters and search engine optimizers that a higher ranked backlink is worth much more than hundreds and maybe thousands of backlinks on pages that do not rank high on search engines.

With this in mind, you should take care of the articles that you submit to article directories not only before submitting them but also after submitting them to your proffered article directories.

Here are some ways that can enhance the visibility of your article on both the article directories and the search engines:

1- Link to your articles from outside the article directory: on your website or on your pages such as on your hubpage or squidoo lense, create a list of articles and point readers to your articles. This will enhance the rank of your article and therefore the value of the links on them, not to mention more readers.

2- Refer to your article when you are speaking about related subjects such as in forums or community websites. This will also rank your article higher and will save you details when you are trying to explain an idea.

3- Bookmark your articles on social bookmarking sites such as Digg and other bookmarking sites. This will create more backlinks to your article, higher rank and therefore better return on your marketing efforts.

4- Use your article in your newsletter and tell your subscribers where they can find your articles. More readers are more hits to your website.

5- Featured Articles: if you can afford it, feature your article on the highly ranked article directories. Your featured articles, depending on the policies of the article directory, will usually show at the top of other articles in the article directory. This will make it easier for the visitors of the directory to find your article and will also rank your article higher in search engines because the first pages of the article category will usually rank higher than deeper pages in search engines.

The point is to optimize and treat your article the same way you optimize and treat any web page you want to rank higher in search engines. Be creative and you will definitely find more ways to market your article and enhance its read rate, rank and therefore your websites rank and hits.

Author Bio: Hassan Sayed a webmaster and article writer at http://www.ezinepost.com