In recent years Article marketing has become an increasingly popular method of getting free high quality traffic to your website. The process of article marketing involves writing short articles targeted for a very specific audience. Article marketing, whilst being a fairly old concept, it has really come of age with the evolution of the internet and increasingly sophisticated search engine technologies. Advances in search engine technologies have really dictated that the way to gain so called “organic” search engine traffic is to work on providing quality content for your visitors. The old days of doing a few on site “SEO” tricks are well gone. What gets your web site rewarded is content. Content is king.

These short articles are then published in an “article directory”. Authors can post their works completely free of charge. The directory owner of the said article directory typically places each article in a category relevant to a certain product, service or area of interest. They derive revenue through numerous methods including Google adsense or other forms of advertising and promotion enabling people that search for similar products to hit the results of these article directories whenever these searchers engage in the act of searching of any form of product, good or service available on the internet.

The articles are also made available to other website owners and mailing list owners to distribute across their particular market niches. You will find even the most obscure niches represented within the article directories. Each article is typically written with a relatively narrow focus of 1 or 2 keywords. The keywords really set the subject for the article with the aim of appealing to a relatively small niche market. This helps to ensure that the traffic derived from these articles are very specifically targeted and hence have a far greater value to the web site owner than untargeted traffic.

The benefits of Article marketing do not simply begin and end with generating traffic direct from article directories and blogs. Another very important benefit of article marketing is to generate large numbers of “back links”. Anybody familiar with even the basics of SEO recognizes the importance of “backlinks” and how they effect your organic listing in the search engines along with your google “page rank”. Another important factor to the overall SEP equation is the quality of the backlinks that you have in place. If you have backlinks originating from high page ranked sites such as article directories, forums and blogs these effectively lend weight to your own “page rank”.

Article marketing is however a labor intensive operation so you need to be prepared for a significant input of time and effort before you start deriving any benefit. The long term benefits however are very real and long lasting. Your articles can still be delivering free traffic years after you have submitted them.

For more information on article marketing and Freelance Jobs and how to get cheap Article Writing