SEO, or search engine optimization, is a term that covers a lot of ground. It involves link building strategies, branding, blogging, onsite optimization, ppc, and much more.

Under link building and branding, article marketing comes into play. You can write articles or have them written for you by a ghostwriter. Once you have the article content, you can submit them to thousands of article directories.

Many people think article marketing stops there. It doesn't. Article directories that accept and reprint your articles are not where your link popularity comes from.

These article directories provide free content to webmasters and bloggers for their website. When these people use your article, the links in your author bio section lead to your website. The websites or blogs they are reprinted on are ususlly going to be relevant to your website and the links from there are valuable in most cases.

That is where good link popularity comes from article marketing. This also means that your articles need to be something someone would want to post on their website. That means that all the garbage articles that contain bad grammar and are just stuffed with keywords have absolutely no value at all.

You can go to a freelance website and find people who say they will write seo articles for you for $5, $3, and even $1.50 per article. They usually live someplace where a dollar goes a long way and they know nothing about article writing or article marketing whatsoever.

The articles they write for you are worth nothing. Whatever you paid for them is money thrown away. The links you get from article directories are not going to help you. Article Directories are not there to give you link popularity. They are there to provide good quality free content to webmasters and bloggers who need reprint material.

Webmasters and Bloggers are not going to reprint garbage articles on their website.

You have to pay more for quality content. That is the bottom line. Article Marketing, when done correctly can get you a lot of traffic and help you build link popularity. Done improperly, it's a waste of your time and money.

One well-written, informative article can bring you more traffic and link popularity than 100 garbage articles.

In addition to the benefits of having a professional write the articles for you is that the content might get picked up by websites with a high Google page rank and websites with a lot of targeted traffic.

People will read a good article all the way to the bottom where your links are and click on those links. They will stop reading a garbage article before they even see your links at the bottom.

Think of your own reading habits. Do you finish an article that is poorly written or one that bores you to tears? Of course not and neither will your potential customers.

And article marketing can help you with branding your name or your company name. People want to deal with people they perceive as an expert in their field. By having quality articles with your byline and company name in them that can be found through searches for your name helps build your reputation as an expert.

Hiring a professional ghostwriter is the key to getting quality articles that will bring you more traffic, help build your brand, and help you build link popularity.