Why should I submit articles to GasPredictor.com? What is this all about? Welcome to the world of "Article Marketing," one of the most effective low-cost ways to increase your Web site's traffic.

That's it in a nutshell: You should submit articles to this Web site in order to get high-quality links to your Web site that will give you targeted visitors and will enhance your site's Page Rank with the search engines.

For more details on how this works, read on. On this page, you'll learn:

• What Article Marketing is
• What Article Marketing does
• Why Article Marketing works
• Why this site offers this powerful marketing vehicle for free

What Article Marketing Is

Side Note: Some Article Directories are better than others. Perhaps the majority fall into the category of "junk," or at best skirt the boundaries. As you will see in reading our Submission Guidelines, we strive to be different. We accept only the highest quality articles, and we accept only articles on a narrow range of subject matter. Therefore, the articles that you submit to us will be published on what is recognized as one of the best Article Directories, and will not get lost in a flood of questionable content.

Standard mode of operation of these Article Directories is that they freely share their articles with each other and with other publishers, so that any Article Directory, Ezine, blog, or indeed any Web site may copy these articles and repost them on their own Web sites and newsletters. The agreement between the Article Directory and the publishers is that the articles must be reposted intact, complete with attribution to the original author, and complete with whatever "hooks of enticement" the original author put into the article.

In order to facilitate this sharing, a standard format of these articles has been developed, so that the summary, body, and "hook" (often called a "Resource Box") can be recognized and posted correctly, regardless of the Article Directory's individual formatting.

Maybe the big picture is beginning to become obvious now. A Web site owner writes an article that includes both valuable informational content (a lot of it) and an enticement to visit his or her Web site (a little enticement), and sends it to an Article Directory. The Article Directory editor examines it and, if they decide that it has quality content, and the right balance of content and enticement so that they won't look like a spammer, they publish it on their Article Directory. If the content is especially good, other Article Directory operators, Web site operators, and bloggers, always hungry for new content, may copy the article and publish it on their own Web sites, and blogs. Meanwhile, the search engines, always hungry to index new content, find this article and make it available to people browsing the Web.

In case you find references to Article Marketing in other sources, here are a few terms that will help you to understand what we're talking about here.

• Article Marketing is a part of the larger field of "Search Engine Optimization" or "SEO."
• Article Marketing is specifically a form of "Off-Site SEO," meaning things you can do on another Web site (the Article Directory) to enhance your own site's search engine ranking.

What Article Marketing does

Article Marketing accomplishes three things, two rather ordinary and one rather magical:

• It gets the name of the author and the name of the author's Web site out onto the Web. The author and the Web site are associated with the valuable informational content of the article, and so the author comes to be recognized as an expert in the subject matter of the article, and the Web site comes to be recognized as a source of valuable information.
• It gets the "hooks of enticement" out onto the Web where they do two things. They entice human readers to click and visit the author's Web site, and they display to the search engines the fact that there are links to that Web site in a number of other Web pages, thus raising the perceived value and importance of the author's Web site.
• The magic: It allows the author's name, the Web site name, and the "hooks" to propagate across the Web, from one Article Directory or Ezine or blog to another, to another, as if the article were something alive. Indeed, a good article does take on a life of its own.

Why Article Marketing works

Article Marketing provides two phenomena that get your Web site noticed.

1. In effect, it multiplies your Web site.
2. It boosts the search engine ranking of your Web site.

Multiplying Your Web Site

The published article constitutes yet another Web page with the same keywords as your Web site, but this page links back to your Web site!

Let's consider an example. One of my Web sites, HikingWithChuck.com, has a page about good-quality inexpensive hiking boots. When a person uses a search engine to find information about good-quality inexpensive hiking boots, the list of matching sites will include HikingWithChuck.com, but also many thousands of other sites. (As of this writing, a search on Google for "good-quality inexpensive hiking boots" without the quotes yields about 17,400 results.) Just in terms of pure odds, the user is not very likely to choose the HikingWithChuck Web site.

Side note: Ironically, this page is beginning to place fairly high in search results for "hiking boots"! Just goes to show you the power of Article Marketing! If you came here looking for information about hiking equipment, try HikingWithChuck. Sorry about that! But now that you're here, if you want to know how the power of Article Marketing can help your Web site, you're certainly welcome to look around!

Now, suppose I publish one article on one Article Directory that uses the exact same keywords as the Web page about hiking boots. Now, when the Web surfer enters the same search, they'll get 17,401 results. (No, it's not really that simple, but let's go with it for purposes of illustration.) Now, two of those results contain my message and entice the user to buy their hiking boots through the HikingWithChuck Web page. With only one article, I have effectively doubled my presence on the Web.

But of course, there's more. Being no dummy, I submitted that article to many Article Directories. And since it was a very high-quality article, it got picked up by many more Article Directories, Ezines, and blogs. So now, the user might get about 17,500 results for their search, and 100 of them are pointing to HikingWtihChuck! From one out of 17,400 results (about 0.006%), I now "own" 100 out of 17,500 (about 0.6%). Granted, 0.6% is a pretty small share, but the point here is that publishing this one good article increased my Web presence for these keywords by a factor of 100!

"Owning" a greater number of search engine results is good, but not really good enough. The problem here is that the odds of a Web surfer clicking any given result out of that set are not evenly distributed among all 17,400 or so results. The person is far, far, far more likely to click on one of the results in the first page or two of results than on any of the following 17,380 results.

That's where the next phenomenon of Article Marketing comes in.

Boosting Your Ranking

When the search engines return a list of pages that match the keywords the user typed in, they give preference to Web pages that are considered "higher quality" Web pages. And one important factor in assigning a "quality" value (or, as Google calls it, "PageRank") is counting how many other pages on the Web contain links to that page.

In other words, of the thousands of Web pages that match the keywords being searched, the pages most likely to be listed among the first ten or twenty results are the ones that have the most external links pointing to them.

That's why you want to have other Web sites exchanging links with you. Their link to your site enhances your "PageRank," and your link to their site enhances their "PageRank."

Some unscrupulous operators have tried to exploit this in the past by creating Web sites that contain nothing but links to other Web sites. Sometimes they would get people to pay to have their sites linked on these "link farms." But this technique doesn't work anymore. The better search engines, such as Google, now assign a "PageRank" based not only on the number of links back to the page, but also on the "PageRank" of the page that contains the link.

Remember, too, that the number of pages linking to a page is only one factor in determining its "PageRank." Another factor is the content of the page.

So a "link farm" page containing only links and/or ads and no real content will have a very low "PageRank" of its own. And pages to which it links will not have their "PageRank" enhanced by virtue of the link on the "link farm," because that link is of poor quality.

What does this mean for Article Directories and Article Marketing?

The Article Directories are not empty "link farms," but sites with real content, and thus with moderately high "PageRank." (Their "PageRank" will not be extremely high, because few pages link to them, but it will be moderately high because they are content-rich and not simply link farms or ad farms.) And any page to which they link via their articles will have its "PageRank" enhanced because it has a link from a page with moderately high "PageRank."

Going back to the example described above, my Web page on hiking boots and my article linking to it, we see the power at work. By publishing this article on the Article Directories and having it republished on many other Web sites because of the quality of the article, my hiking boots page now has a high "PageRank." There are a hundred or so pages out there on the Web, each with a moderately high "PageRank," all linking to my original hiking boots page.

So now, when the user searches for high-quality inexpensive hiking boots, they'll still get more than 17,000 results, but the first page of results is likely to contain my original hiking boots page, because it matches the keywords and it has a high "PageRank." And incidentally, even if the user scrolls past the first ten or twenty results, there are fairly good odds that they will choose a link to one of the copies of my article, because there are many copies in the list of results, and each of them has a moderately high "PageRank."

Why this site offers this powerful marketing vehicle for free

So, why do Article Directories like this one give away this free publicity and allow "just anyone" to use their Web sites to boost the "PageRank" of their own Web sites? Simple: Content.

We Article Directory publishers are getting a lot of high-quality content, essentially for free. (It's not really "free," but we'll get back to that in a moment.) Having all these pages of fresh, high-quality content every week enables us to keep our own "PageRank" very high.

Typical Article Directories support themselves by displaying advertisements. They generate advertising revenue in proportion to the number of visitors they receive and, in the case of Google AdSense and most other reputable advertising services, in proportion to the quality of their content as measured by their "PageRank."

And they enhance both the number of visitors they attract and their "PageRank" by having more content, and better-quality content.

Of course, GasPredictor.com has another purpose, too. We use this Article Directory to attract more visitors to our main site and our main product, our "Gas Predictor Newsletter." So we operate much like a typical Article Directory, but with the additional objective of promoting our main site.

Authors who use Article Marketing to enhance the "PageRank" and visitor traffic to their own Web sites are providing the Article Directory publishers with the content they need for "free." And the Article Directory publishers are providing them with this marketing venue for "free."

As was mentioned a few paragraphs above, the content is not really "free" for the Article Directory publishers. They pay their own staff, a considerable number of people in some cases, to screen out the garbage articles. They want to publish only those articles that meet their standards of quality, because they don't want their "PageRank" to suffer, as it would if they began publishing garbage.

There is also an intangible cost to the Article Directory publishers for this "free" content. That is, they give something away to the authors of these articles: "Free" publicity.

Similarly, there is a cost to the author for this "free" publicity. They must work to ensure that their articles conform to the Article Directory publisher's standards of quality, and they must "give away" some of their information and knowledge.

Side note: Many of those who promote Article Marketing call it a "no-cost" or "free" way to get traffic. It isn't "free." You may have noticed in the first sentences of this page we called it a "low-cost" way to get traffic. It costs you something. It requires you to give away some of your expertise, so you must carefully balance how much you give away as an enticement. Give away something that your readers will find genuinely valuable, but don't give away the store. Above all, it costs you your time. If you're like most Web site owners and publishers, you have more time than money, but don't think your time has no value. Article Marketing is a "no-cash" way to get traffic, but not "no-cost."

It's a classic give-and-take. Article Directory publishers give away publicity for the authors and take informational Web page content. Authors give away information and take publicity.

Next Steps

Now it's time to get started in Article Marketing.

Find appropriate content that you can submit as an article:

• Take some of the existing content on your Web site and winnow it down to an article. Abbreviate it. Leave in some valuable information, but also leave some out. Give the reader a reason to go to your Web site for more.
• Study the questions your existing customers or Web site visitors ask. Write up the answer in the form of an article.
• Just start talking about your subject matter, as if telling an interested friend about it, and write down what you say.

Then submit your article to us!