OK boys and girls. Today we're having a pop quiz.

I heard that groan. Don't worry. This will be over in a matter of seconds.

Q1: "__________" is King.

Q2: Link "____________" and link "____________" matter oodles to Google.

The answers are provided in the following...

Are you hearing a lot of talk from marketers about writing and submitting artic|es to art:cle directories and other ezine publishers? I knew you were. There's been a glut of articles on writing articles. For good reason.

Now I haven't been actively writing and submitting articles until just recently, but the effects have been noticeable. So, what have I noticed?

In the last 4 weeks, I submitted three artic|es to a broad network of article directories and announcement groups. Yes, I did take one week off. So call me a slacker. The three article titles that I submitted were:

"How to Put Your Bookmark on Top Every Time."

"When a Customer Has Done Everything to Get Your Goat"

"We'll fix that later..."

I'm going to report the following numbers in real time as I'm writing this article. This relates to "Q2" above. You can do this too because I'll describe each step exactly. It's real simple.

1) Go to http://www.google.com 2) Type the exact article title for each of the following titles and put it inside of quotation marks. (The quotation marks force Google to look for the exact phrase.) 3) Click the "Google Search" button, and... 3) Be am@zed.

Google reports:

"How to Put Your Bookmark on Top Every Time" - Indexed on 5,820 pages

"When a Customer Has Done Everything to Get Your Goat" - Indexed on 62 pages

"We'll fix that later..." - Indexed on 554 pages

Now, am I going to tell you that in 3 weeks time I've managed to generate 6,436 inbound links to my website? Not. Submitting artic|es doesn't do those kinds of miracles, but my artic|es are definitely out there for other webmasters and ezine publishers to use.

Unique visitor count to GoThrive.com has double since starting my article submissions, and as the artic|es get picked up and published, the inbound links will continue to materialize with time. Not a bad investment of time since the entire process of writing the article and submitting it takes no more than one hour per week.

Inbound links pointing to your website are a very good thing to have. This is part 1 answer to question 2 above.

Link Popularity.

The second part of the answer to question 2 above is equally important. You see, it's not just how many inbound links are out there voting for your site, but it's also important that they're voting for the right thing.

Link Reputation.

Let's say you have a website that promotes running shoes, and you write an article on the wonderful benefits of odor eaters. When you write your article, you'll have the opportunity to include a resource box at the end of your article and this is where you can capitalize on your chance to build link reputation.

The idea behind "link reputation" is that the inbound links use keywords in the text that match the theme of the page to which the link is pointing.

One more time nice and slow. I don't want you to miss this.

*** The idea behind "link reputation"... *** is that the inbound links use keywords in the text *** that match the theme of the page *** to which the link is pointing.

This is a fundamental SEO principle that you should keep in mind not only when writing a resource box for an article, but also when you're designing your web pages.

So, to do this right, you'll want your odor eater article's resource box to have an odor eater keyword-laden link pointing to an odor eater page on your running shoes website. Does that make sense?

As the article's author you're in the perfect position to get the second part of the linking equation just right.

~ You decide what your resource box will say. ~ You decide what keywords are used in the link pointing to your website. ~ And you decide which page the link is directed to.

2 down. 1 to go.

Now for Q1. "Content is King." There. I said it. There's no disputing that all of the major search engines crave content. Enter stage left, Mr. Article Author.

If you're writing artic|es and submitting them to article directories, you also need to be posting those artic|es on your 0wn website. When you do so, add about 20% unique content to your webpage so that it's not exactly like every other webpage that's been uploaded to the net. Search engines don't like to see a lot of duplicate content, so take this little extra step to make sure that your page is unique.

Let's review...

Q1: "_____________" is King.

A1: "C_o_n_t_e_n_t" is King.

Q2: Link "___________________" and link "___________________" matter oodles to Google.

A2: Link "P_o_p_u_l_a_r_i_t_y" and link "r_e_p_u_t_a_t_i_o_n" matter oodles to Google.

The service that I've been using for article submissions is SubmitYourArticle.com (http://www.submityourarticle.com), and I've got to say that I love it. I make one submission using SubmitYourArticle.com and my article is automatically submitted to an additional 22 article directories with only one click of the mouse. They offer a number of cool tools and if you're looking for content for your 0wn website, it's a terrific place to start.

Start today by casting a vote for your own website. Nobody will mind. In fact, you'll find that there are large masses of ezine publishers and webmasters who'd be glad to vote for your website too.

Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton

Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. Subscribe to "GoThrive Online", for big juicy marketing tips in small, easy-to-chew, bite size servings. 17 Free Cool Tools... http://www.gothrive.com