"Article marketing" is a phrase used to describe publishing your own written articles on separate websites, including blogs and electronic magazines. There is most often no compensation, except that beneath your article, in a "resource box," brief information about yourself and links to your own website may be included.

Article marketing provides several benefits, such as establishing yourself as an expert, generating leads, increasing traffic to your site and greatly improving your search engine rank. In fact, it has become so popular that there are software packages and even websites which help you to syndicate articles to hundreds and even thousands of websites.

Some websites accept your articles for free but have a small charge, usually less than $10, to re-distribute your article to a hundred other distribution lists, which will in turn distribute the article even further. This can very quickly increase the search results in any search engine, and is an extremely cost effective way to improve your search rankings.

However, article marketing is not just for internet marketers. Different sites have a variety of topics on which they accept articles, and they are always looking for new topics to spice up their website. So whichever is your area of expertise, there will always be someone out there who wants to learn more, and webmasters who are ready to accept free content.

Also important to article marketing is search engine optimization or SEO. A publisher needs to have a thorough understanding of how search algorithms work and be familiar with commonly used search terms. This will help the publisher determine which websites would be the best to place a particular article, helping to ensure the site visitors are actually looking for the information the article has to offer.

Keeping SEO in mind however does not always mean publishing content which is more searchable. Sometimes it may be done during the web development stage, so that the coding and structure of the website and it's presentation enables search engines to properly index the site. Or the webmaster may decide to include unique content on his site which are easily indexed by search engines, and at the same time are attractive to human visitors.

Having your own article published online is a smooth path toward your expertise becoming recognized. A good piece remains on-topic, is clear and user-friendly, and assists the reader somehow. Many websites will not display your writing if it conspicuously promotes your product or service, so plugging should definitely not be the primary focus. The most profitable compositions best satisfy the unique needs of the webpage's visitors.