If you read any basic search engine optimisation book you will see that building back-links plays a very important part in your websites marketing strategy. One of the ways link building can be done is by using article distribution. Article writing has become a core part of any webmasters routine of promoting and link building. It is a great way to provide quality content for readers while gaining effective back-links to your website.

These days there are literally thousands (even tens of thousands) of article directories that offer free back links in return for content, however you need to stick with directories that have 3 basic principles. 1) Quality design that is easy to use and not stuffed with advertising banners. 2) Not full of tens of thousands of redundant categories with little content 3) maintains high quality control using real humans to check the content and follows strict submission guidelines. The guideliens should be clearly posted somewhere on the site.

Article writing can take a lot of time to do correctly and you need some knowledge of writing and a good understanding of the english language. If you spend the time writing to finding ways to distribute your articles you must be sure that the time you spend is worthwhile, remember quality not quantity is the key to success. Even more so if you are paying writers to create the content for you – make sure you receive high quality work.

But how can you be sure this is an effective way of link building? Actually it is generally known that article marketing is one of the best ways to build links. The main reason for this is that you are building links to your site from high quality content rich pages and its believed this has a dramatic effect on the popularity your site is given by search engines. You must not take opinions for granted though – you must employ methods to monitor the success of your article campaigns. Use tools such as Google Analytics to monitor your traffic and check the kind of respone you are seeing from your articles.

There are a number of ways you can track this success. Use Google Webmaster tools to monitor your incoming links and ensure your articles are being found by the search engines. You can also review the number of views your article is getting, many article directories have basic statistics regarding how many people have viewed your article. Lastly, check your article has been found by search engines by performing a search that you know will match exactly to your articles title. If you articles are not being picked up by search engines you need to address why they are not. Perhaps the article is duplicate, or the article directory has poor search engine optimisation.

Dont forget about traffic either, whilst article marketing is a great way to build links, it can also be a great way to drive quality traffic to your site, as readers follow your article links to learn more about your subject matter. If you write great content, you will keep readers interested and they will continue coming back to your author pages and your websites. Maintain a blog and twitter feed to track your articles, and your readers will be able to find the articles you submit more easily. Many articles sites offer per author RSS feeds as well which you can add to your favourite RSS reader.

To summarise the above, article marketing can be a very effective way of link building providing you ensure you carefully monitor your success using webmaster tools. Take care to only submit to quality article directories. Sites with poor design and even poorer quality control are ones to avoid.

Author Bio: Chris.David operate Articles Counter Directory a new high quality human edited Articles Directory to publish your content to. Submit Your Article for free and comment on other contributions.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: articles,article,articles submission,free articles,web marketing,seo,web promotion,webmasters