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.

Writing original relevant content is a much more efficient way of article marketing but does require some invested effort in researching and writing the content, but you are more likely to increase referrals to your site if you have something original to say that they havent already read or heard, and you are more likely to get inbound links to your page from other sites if they 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 site listed on Google is one thing, getting it to appear high in the search rankings is completely another. Achieving this is probably the major goal of anyone involved in trying to promote an application on the world wide web, since Google, for the moment anyway, is probably the single-most important entity on the world wide web. The first and foremost rule you need to understand is that whilst there are lots of guidelines and common-sense rules, this is not a hard science and anyone who trys to sell you their SEO services claiming that they can guarantee you will in the top 10 results on Google in a fortnight are generally not to be trusted.

If you keep in mind that Google reportedly changed its search engine algorithm more than 400 times in 2007 should send a strong message that the Google index is constantly changing. The complexity and fluidity of the ranking algorithm, as Google continually seek to supply users with the most useful relevant results, means that it can be a difficult target to hit.

Search engine optimization (SEO) concerns itself with the order in which webpages get ranked when keywords or phrases are searched for in search engines. More specifically, it is concerned with how you might promote a page to rank higher than its ‘competitors’ by using various techniques. The higher a page is ranked, the more likely that page will draw a greater number of site visitors. For company websites, increased traffic often leads to increased sales, and article marketing has proven to be useful and effective in helping achieve this for many.