Many people are now finding that one of the most powerful and effective ways of promoting any website that they have is to write articles on the subject of their site.

You may wonder what writing articles has to do with promoting your site and below we will show you the reasons why this method of marketing is so effective.

Firstly, you will find that the internet is providing major assistance to people surfing the web by providing them with information and content on various times. I forget how many times I have heard people say that in internet marketing content contained within a site is king.

What every web site owner knows is that content is a major part of any site and this could be provided by way of a small amount of text, articles, audio information, video clips, news feeds, images, charts or graphs.

The reason you need to know why content is so important to your site is because this is how such sites as Google can make an informed decision on which sites for each particular search that has been carried out on a particular subject. The only way that Google can do this is by having set up a certain criteria that it uses to determine the quality of each web site found, and they do this by using their Page Rank (PR) system. It has been found that one of the most major factors that they rely on heavily when using this system is how many other sites that are either pointing or linking to a certain site. Or those that are “voting” on a certain site. Therefore if you have more content within your site you are more likely to have more sites both pointing to and linking with your site which will help to increase your PR ranking.

A good way of getting such links to your site is by using the system of one way back links. This means that another site has your link on theirs but you have not reciprocated by putting theirs on yours.

What you need to know now is how do you convince another site owner to place a link to your site on theirs. There are a number of ways of doing this, you could either use a Reciprocal Linking Directory, this is the type of site that acts as a middleman between site owners and is great for saving time as you do not have to contact each web site owner directly that you wish to link with.

Or if you wish to make things that little more personal, then you can send an email to other site owners or even by buying links from high Page Rank sites.

Thirdly you could arrange to leave comments at blogs; however you must not forget to include your signature with your URL.

The fourth and final method we would suggest is that you provide a testimonial on the product or service that you are providing on your site, once again do not forget to include a bank link to your site when using this method.

Finally we are going to look at reciprocal linking in this part of the article. There is nothing wrong with using this method of linking, however, what you must remember is that Search Engines are looking at all incoming links to your site and comparing them to the number of out bound links that you have. The more that they find that are linking to your site then the higher your PR would be. Also Google are searching for site that have more natural linking and if they see too many reciprocal links then it understands that this is arrangement linking and this will result in your PR being lower. To be honest reciprocal linking is not only time consuming but could end up costing you in relation to your PR ranking.

So really the best way forward to ensure that you get one way links to your site is by article marketing. Remember in every article that you produce you should include a resource box. Within this you would have your name, a small biography about yourself (only a few words) and a bit about your site as well as the all important back link. This would be considered the most important part of any article that you write, as the back link in the resource box is what will get the visitors coming to your site.

In the next part of this article I will be provide you with information on the importance of anchor text in your articles in your use of this as a promotional tool.