One of the most important things when you are search engine marketing is the creation of inbound links.

And of course those inbound links have to come from a web site somewhere.

So you have to have some willing web master who wants to send traffic to your web site.

Of course, you can always pay for the links – but why pay for the links if you can get them for free – which is what happens with article marketing.

You see, in article marketing, web masters will willingly place your article and a link to your web site on their web site, in exchange for the content you are letting him use.

You see, when you write content for him – it is like free content for him – and his part of the bargain is to give you a link.

Here is how I do it:

1) I write keyword optimized articles about my niche topics, and include in each of them a link to my web site. In most cases, I use a link to a squeeze page, where I include an offer for a free gift or other giveaway, which allows me to receive a name and email address in addition to just getting the visitor.

2) I submit each article to as many as 100 article directories. This way I get as many as 100 inbound links for each article that I write. Of course, I usually get many more, as many web masters go to the web sites that I submit the articles to, to get content for their own site – and of course they put a link to me in their web site too. There really is an exponential effect to this.