Any website owner who starts down the path of internet marketing will soon discover how many “guru’s” are out there all claiming some secret trick to boost your search engine rankings.The reality of it is there are some key things to pay close attention to, but a lot of success just comes down to hard work and consistency.  Depending on what keywords you want to rank for, you can achieve success in a week or 2 or it may take months of hard work to get any results.

Asisde from basic webpage SEO stuff to make sure everything is done correctly, the biggest single factor still in your rankings is the number of links and where they come from.  The PR(page rank) of the site linking to you is important, as is the content on that site.  Recipricol links used to work really well (you link me, I link you) but now its really downplayed by Google as a valid method of links.

The easiest way to get links and boost your overall marketing efforts is through article marketing.This is not the path of the least work, it is the best path to get good, long term results.The basic setup is very simple

1. Do some keyword research on your topic.  Pick 2-4 keywords you will focus on.Make sure the words have decent search volume, but do not go after stuff that is too competitive as they will be very hard to rank on in a reasonable time.
2. Plan on writing 10 – 12 articles of 300-400 words each, using 2 of the keywords with links to your site in each article, with no more than 3 links per article total.Use the kwyword itself as your link text, not http://.
3. Publish 4 of the articles on a major article directory that has good ranking such as Ezine Articles or ArticlesBase.  These have human reviewers so it will take a bit of time to get your article published.Luckily they do not require unique posts that are exclusive, so while you are waiting for their approval you can get it posted elsewhere as well.
4. Make sure you use some quality software tools to assist in the spinning of content and links.  Basically spinning allows you to subsitute words and sentences for one another so that you can get a different article from the same basic article.  DO NOT try to use rewriting software – I have seen none that do a decent job – usually it reads like garbage and that will not help your rankings.If you spin an article right, you can often easily get 10-20 significantly different articles from a single source.
5. The next step is to mass distribute your articles to sites looking for great content.You can do this for free with the slow manual approach, or you can purchase some tools to greatly speed this up.  I usually choose to pay some money in the savings of time.  There are so many things to do, you have to trade off somewhere.  You want to make sure you spread out the distribution - its unnatural for any site to go from no links to 500 links in 1 day - what is more natural is 0 to 10 to 18 to 25 to 40 … over many weeks build the level up.
6. You should start tracking where you rank on the few keywords you have chosen.After you have used article directories to get about 300 links or so you should start to see a boost in rankings.  Some keywords that are not as competitive, much less, and of course, some it might take thousands.Your goal on most keywords should be to get into the top 10-15 in ranking, number 1 is nice but sometimes the effort needed to keep and hold it is not worth it.
7. In addition to the article work, you can also use social media accounts to link to each of the articles you publish AND also to your main web site.  You should make a hub pages site and a squidoo lens about your site or niche as well with links to the site.

Sites all want content on them to improve the quality score.  Most look to articles about their niche topic to keep the viewer on the site and get better ranking.This is the key to article marketing - you provide content and get a link, webmasters who desire content can grab and publish what you wrote.