Publishing articles on the Internet is a tremendous way to increase the number of inbound links to your site. As articles are assimilated into search engine indexes, they also begin to act as landing pages generating traffic for your site. Whenever possible, you should publish articles to promote your site.
Article Content
The content of your articles should be directed to the most basic elements of your product or service. Whenever possible, try to write "how to" or "introduction to" articles. Topics like these will garner the biggest interest and be picked up by other sites. Articles that cover finer points of a subject work as well, but you should expect a smaller readership.
Article Tone
Your articles should be packed with information, not sales pitches. When writing articles, one tends to concentrate on how to get potential readers to visit your site. This approach is a mistake. You have to think of both the readers AND webmasters that will be looking for articles.
Image you are a Webmaster that needs content for your site. You go to one of the article directories looking for material to add to your site. Are you going to select articles that are sales pitches designed to take your visitors to another site? No. You are going to select articles that provide your visitors with some valuable information. Don't write sales pitches!
Links
Articles are a great way to quickly build the link counts for sites. The search engines universally appear to like them, a rare event these days. So, what's the best strategy for using links in your articles?
The best linking strategy for articles involves putting not more than two links in your byline. This is admittedly a personal preference, but I find more than two links looks "clunky" and many depositories won't allow any more than two.
Regardless, the two links in the byline of your articles should go to two distinct pages of your site. The first might be to your home page, while the second goes to a page that is related to the subject of the article. With each new article, you should change the links to new pages. This allows you to build link popularity for both your home page and internal pages of your site. I have found Google, in particular, heavily favors sites that multiple pages with high link counts.
HTML v. Text Links
With some depositories, you have the opportunity to place html code in your bylines. This, of course, lets you avoid typing out the URLs for your site pages, but should you? I would encourage you to type out the URLS for one reason. It is important to make it as easy as possible for Webmasters to republish your article on their site. Don't make them figure out the domains of your hyperlinked text, particularly sub-domains.
In Closing
I have used article campaigns to market many sites. As long as you go about it correctly, you should be able to do the same thing for your site.
Halstatt Pires is with MarketingTitan.com - http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing and advertising company. Visit our article section - http://www.marketingtitan.com/internet_marketing_articles - to read more internet marketing articles.