When it comes to SEO, there are plenty of misconceptions, especially among new webmasters and those who have just started out in online business. Some people seem to believe that just by doing the most basic SEO work or by hiring some SEO “expert” for $5 at Digital Point, they would be able to propel their site to 1^st place on Google within a few days. For anyone that thinks that way, well sorry but this is just not how SEO works.

If you want to improve your websites ranking on the search engines, then your goals will need to be realistic. One of the ways of doing so would be to take a look at the websites that are already ranked for the keywords that you are targeting. Do a keyword analysis of your site to see which keywords you would be better off targeting. In many cases, you will be able to find some long tail keywords that are more specific to your offerings and that have less competition. If you do business at a local level, then targeting some local keywords can also be very helpful. Once again, the reason behind this is that the competition for local keywords is a lot lower than for the more general ones, thus it would be much easier for you to rank for them.

One thing that you will need to understand about SEO is that it is more of a long term process, rather than an instant solution to get traffic to your website right away. If you have just created your website, then it can take several weeks or even months before you are able to get any decent amount of traffic from natural search engine results in certain high competition, popular niches.

For this reason, you need to consider using some other advertising methods in the meantime to bring some traffic to your website. Pay per click search advertising obviously comes to mind here. Many would say that it brings you the same results than SEO, but is able to do so a lot faster. The major drawback, however is that you will need to spend some money on it, sometimes considerable amounts if the keywords that you are targeting are quite competitive and thus very valuable.

If you truly want your website to bring you the money that you want, then you would need to understand that online advertising is a very diverse environment, where you have dozens of different ways to generate traffic to your website besides using SEO. Using media buying, article marketing, social media marketing or video marketing are all things that you can do alongside SEO to make your site more popular. Remember what the main focus behind creating a website is: to make money for you. By employing the proper strategies to get the visitors that you need, you will be able to improve your ROI by getting more visitors and turning these website visitors into profitable clients for your business.

Using article marketing is a good way to drive some traffic to your sites, as it works in two different ways. First, you can receive traffic from people who are viewing your article and then decide to click through to continue on to your site. You also have some SEO benefits from it, as every time you include a link to your site, it counts as a one way backlink which can be very useful in boosting your search engine ranking. But are there some things you should do to increase the efficiency of your article marketing efforts? Definitely. Here are some of them:

• Use Only Unique Content

In most cases, article directories only accept content that is unique and has never been posted anywhere before. It doesn’t matter if you wrote it, or if it has been posted on a site that you own. Your content needs to be unique. Search engines frown on duplicate content and so do visitors. If someone starts reading the article and notices that they have already seen the exact same information some where else, they will probably just move on to something else and not bother continuing.

• Avoid Making too Many “Salesy” Articles

There are way too many fake “reviews” of online products being posted all over the place and this is something that seems to be especially popular when promoting internet marketing related stuff such as e-books, membership sites and courses. The articles usually go like this: “Product X is a SCAM!! Arrghh!!! Oops… Actually, It’s Not, Buy It!!!!!” See, the thing is these might have been effective 6 years ago or so… but not anymore. The problem is that there are simply too many of them and the reader will automatically see that your “review” is completely bogus and you are just trying to make money by selling your own, or an affiliate product.

Articles that you post should always include useful information about your niche. For example, if you are promoting an “alternative energy” guide, you could post something about the different kinds of ways you can generate alternative energy and their pros and cons. Or, you could go into detail about how a certain method works and then explain why you think that it would be suitable as a solution for someone looking for an alternative energy generator for their home. Believe me, this is much, much more likely to result in someone visiting your site and buying the product you are promoting, as opposed to simply going on and on about how great the ‘ACME Green Energy Super Guide’ is and why everyone on the planet should drop everything that they’re doing and rush to buy it. Keep the sales pitch for your website. If a user has clicked through to it, then it means they are seeking more information about what you just told them in the article and now would be a good time to propose some products to buy.

When we talk about internet marketing, many people instantly seem to think that it is related to affiliate offers and building a website to host some Adsense ads. Sure, these things are what many people do to earn money on the internet, but they are not the only components of online marketing. If you have a local business, you can use the internet to draw more clients and above all, to get your business known in the community. There are various options for you to use to get the word out. Yesterday, we have talked about local SEO and your options for doing it. But search engine traffic is not the only way for you to get visitors to your website and clients for your business. Let’s examine a few other ways to get what you are looking for.

Getting Traffic

Whether you are pushing affiliate offers, or have your own, physical small business, you want traffic to your site. Traffic simply means visitors that look at your website. There are many ways to get this traffic: SEO (which we talked about yesterday), online classified ad sites, social media sites and targeted media buying. We will explore these one by one to see what the advantages (and sometimes drawbacks) are of using these methods. That way, you will be able to make a decision on how to advertise your business online.

Classified Ads Sites (Craigslist, Gumtree, Backpage, Kijiji and dozens more).

There are various sites which let you place a classified ad, which is similar to what you would see in a newspaper. There are some main, worldwide sites such as Craigslist, but there are also some local sites which could be geared towards people in your locality. For example, in French Canada where I live, the website Annonce123.com is very popular with people and attracts a lot of local traffic.

In order to maximize your chances of success and to take the highest advantage of the sites it is recommended that you:

• Post on all the sites. That’s right, both the national sites which have a section for your city and the smaller, local sites (if present in your locality). Posting an ad on these sites is free and takes 2 or 3 minutes. Remember, even if you only get 10 views a day for your ad, one of these viewers could be your next biggest customer. Say if you own a car rental place, the viewer could be a diplomat from Monaco on a temporary assignment in your city, who will rent your most expensive car for 6 months. Think of the money you will make with him. Sure, this is rare… but you never know… and if he doesn’t see your ad, well he never know your car rental business existed and use a competitor instead.
• Make you ad look interesting. Your ad should stand out and be engaging to the users. Thus, use a good title and also, make sure that you use proper spelling and grammar in the ad. Believe me, it helps.
• Use the “featured” or “upgrade” options if possible. Many sites, for a small fee of (varies from $0.50 to a few dollars) will let your ad be “featured”. This means that it will be either on top of all the other ads, or will have highlighting that will draw attention to it. If you have a few dollars to spare, use this option.

Tomorrow, we will examine social media sites and how they can be useful for marketing your local business on the internet.

Yesterday, we saw that there are certain ways that a local business can employ to attract local traffic that will be useful to them. One of these ways is by doing SEO on your site. Now SEO may seem like it is something complicated, but in reality it is not. There are some very simple things that you can do to make your website look more attractive to search engines and thus rise through the rankings faster than you would have ever thought possible. Also, if you need to do some SEO on your site and don’t want to do all of the work yourself, then there are service providers which can do some of the SEO work for you cheaply.

When we talk about SEO, there are a few things that you need to consider if you want to do proper SEO for your small business website. There are two categories of factors which will affect your position in search engines. One is on site factors and the other one is off site factors.

On Site Factors

How your site will do in terms of SEO will depend on how your overall site is designed and the content on it. If you run a local small business, it is better to focus on targeting keywords that have your main product or service name, in addition to the name of the city that you service. That way, you will have less competition that you need to beat to get to the top of search engine results. This is especially true if you are in a relatively small city, then you might only have 2 or 3 competitors. Also, remember to add content to your website regularly. You may want to add a few articles related to your niche that are optimized to your main keyword and the name of your city too.

Off Site Factors

The main off site factor is the amount of backlinks that your site has. Backlinks are the amount of links coming from other websites and that point towards your site. However, quantity is not the main focus here. Quality is more important. The backlinks need to come from reputed sites which have some kind of relation to your niche.

Learning SEO

There are plenty of detailed, yet easy to understand guides on SEO available online. You can find these simply by doing a Google search. Or, you can look through internet marketing forums to find some useful guides, as well as additional advice on SEO techniques that you may want to use.

Outsourcing SEO Work

Doing SEO for your site will involve doing things such as writing articles, building backlinks and submitting your site to business directories. While these could easily be done by yourself, the main drawback is that they take time to do. If you want to outsource these relatively cheaply, then check out some internet marketing forums, as these have a section where people can buy and sell various kinds of services. You can also look at a site such as Fiverr, where you can outsource many tasks for just $5 each.

One of the main attractions of advertising your business in the online world is that you are able to reach people all over the world. Anyone, from anywhere can visit your website and do business with you. However, for certain small businesses, this is not what they need, especially if they only do business in a certain local area. Therefore, for them, receiving visitors from all over the country and all over the world will be quite useless and will simply result in wasted time and wasted bandwidth on their website.

Think of it this way. If you run a local landscaping business, you don’t need people from the other end of the country seeing your website. It will be as useless to them as it is to you. The visitor will simply see that you don’t serve their area and then leave your site. For them, seeing your website would have simply been nothing more than a waste of time. But how do you target visitors that are only from the area that you do business in? There are many ways in which this can be accomplished. We will take a look at some of the techniques that you can use to make this happen.

Proper Local SEO

Sure, there are many different ways to get people to see your website. With dozens of different advertising options, many business owners don’t focus much on SEO, considering it too complicated to perform on their own and too costly to outsource to a professional firm. As you will see, both of these assertions are not necessarily true. In any case, even if you don’t expect search engine traffic to be your main source of clicks, doing some SEO work on your site is recommended, even if it is just the most basic type.

Basic SEO is not complicated at all for a local business. It simply consists of targeting the right keywords in the proper way. Therefore, you should optimize your content towards keywords that are more “local” than simply general keywords. So if you run a landscaping business in Boca Raton, Florida, you would optimize your content for keywords such as “Boca Raton landscaping” or “landscaping in Boca Raton”. By doing so, you will only be competing for rankings with local businesses, which is easier than trying to rank for the more general “landscaping”. Furthermore, a person doing a search for (product or service) + city is more likely to be in buying mode and seeking out a place where they can GET the service in your city. Even if they are not ready to make a decision yet and are just comparing prices, they are much more likely to contact YOU if they notice that your business offers the best value. On the other hand, someone searching for “landscaping” could simply be looking for landscaping tips and tricks and not interested in hiring anyone’s services.

But is it really hard to do SEO for local businesses and is it really costly to get help? These are topics that we will discuss in the second part.

As we all know, any webmaster wants their website to get traffic, and as much targeted traffic as they possibly can get. Of course, there are certain ways to get that traffic and a webmaster needs to do some actions in order to receive it. People will not just randomly type your website address in their browser to get to your site. They have to somehow find it first. One of the most common ways for people to find a website online is to make a query in a search engine for a keyword that they are interested in. In order to get your site as close as you can to the top of the search results, you need to do some SEO work. But SEO is not always the right solution to get traffic to your website. Let’s take a look at for what type of webmaster is SEO important for:

• You are building a long-term business centered around 1 main site

If you expect your website to be the online address of your main business, then doing SEO will have many advantages. You will not need to spend as much money advertising, as people will be able to find your site through natural search results. By doing proper SEO, you will be able to eventually get ahead of your competitors on search engines like Google. Since you have long term plans, then you have a bit more time to get your site to get a decent amount of traffic.

• You don’t want to spend too much time or money on advertising

There are many solutions available online where you can advertise your site and pay either for the number of views that your ad has received or the amount of clicks that it gets. But, not everybody wants to spend time tracking and optimizing various ad campaigns so that they will yield the maximum results. Also, not everyone has the budget necessary to constantly pay for online advertising. In that case, focusing on getting traffic from natural search results could be the right path for you to go on.

• Your business is in a niche that is not very competitive

If your business is in a niche that is quite specialized and doesn’t have many competitors, then using SEO techniques to get your site to the top is a great way to get the traffic that you want. Since you do not have a lot of competitors, it will be a lot easier to get your site to number one of the search results on Google. You will also spend far less time on SEO work than someone who is operating in a very competitive niche.

But are there cases where SEO is not the best choice? Yes, it depends on what kind of site you are putting up. We’ll take a look at these cases tomorrow and see what other ways you could use to bring traffic to your website in these cases.

If you own a local small business, then you are probably looking for ways to increase your business visibility in the online world. Well, there are various ways that this can be accomplished. For example, you can use social media or pay per click ad solutions. But let’s not forget that SEO is important too. However, many small business owners neglect to pay any attention to SEO, because they believe that there is way too much competition and that they will not be able to advance anywhere in the rankings.

But recently, Google has made some changes to the way search results are ranked when it comes to local keyword. The search engine uses geo location to determine the area where the user is located in and then displays search results which are relevant both to the user’s area and the keywords they were looking for.

How do you take advantage of this recent change to go up in the rankings? It is actually relatively easy, there are just a few things to do:

First, optimize your pages for both your main keyword and the area in which you do business. So for example if your main keyword is “plumbing” and you do business in Miami, then you would optimize your pages for the keywords “plumbing Miami” and “Miami plumbing”. Also, be sure that every one of your pages has a reference to your location on it. This can be easily done simply by putting your address and phone number in the footer of every page. Not only does this allow customers to see your contact info on each page, but will also let Google determine your location more easily.

If your business is not listed on Google Maps, then you should make sure that it is. Simply request a listing and it will appear in the results in the next few weeks. Local business listings appear on Google Maps together with web sites, so it will make it very easy for your customers to find you.

To optimize your website for “local SEO”, it is also a good idea to list your business in as many online business directories as possible. Not only will this potentially give you traffic coming from the directory itself, but it will also give you some very valuable backlinks as well. Backlinks that are coming from other sites that are related to your area, such as local business associations, chambers of commerce, etc. are also very helpful in this scenario.

While doing SEO may seem complicated, in reality it is not. You just need to have the proper information and take time to do the right actions. Remember that SEO is not meant to replace, but rather to work together with other types of online advertising that your business uses, so you can still keep using Adwords or social media ads in addition to deploying efforts to get your site to rise through the rankings.

Two different methods of internet marketing, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, are pay per click (PPC) advertising and organic SEO. Let us take quick look how to affectively use them and what some of the benefits and drawbacks are.

PPC Advertising

PPC is exactly what it sounds like, you pay every time somebody clicks your advertisement, the most popular PPC network is Google Adwords but there are many different providers of PPC programs. The most obvious benefits to PPC advertising are immediate exposure to your market, flexible plans for spending (theoretically the more you spend, the more traffic you get) and quite a bit of control over the whole operation. Using PPC advertising networks can be tricky but there are rules and guidelines that you can follow that will almost guarantee results.

PPC Adwords is based entirely around keywords, an advertiser bids on certain keywords so that every time their ad is shown and clicked, they pay a certain their bid amount. The tricky part is choosing quality keywords that will ensure your ads are being shown to people who should be seeing them. Let us say that you are selling a book on self help, what keywords would you bid for? Some will be obvious but out of your price range, for example “self help books” might be a bit above your budget, so you have to get creative. Try to put yourself in the mind of an internet browser who is looking to buy a book on self help; would you be searching for something like “ways to be happy” or for a product like “self help book to make me happy”? Figuring out what your target market wants is essential to a successful PPC campaign.

Organic SEO

Another option for advertising online is organic SEO, this is traditionally viewed as ranking for your keywords in search engines but has also recently referred to building reputation on social networks, for now we will focus on the benefits of ranking for your keywords.

Similar to PPC advertising, establishing an organic position in search engines is dependent on keywords. You want to target and optimize your website for keywords that will bring in visitors you want to have visiting your website, i.e. visitors who want to buy your products. There are many different ways to optimize your website and begin ranking online for your keywords, fortunately most of them from building backlinks to article marketing, be creative and use the internet for research, you will have more tactics than you know what to do with before too long.

PPC advertising and organic SEO are both viable and important options, both challenging, both potentially rewarding and can both bring you visitors, invest some time learning about them today to start converting more and earning more.

Image Source: Seolair

One of the most discussed areas things people talk about (after social media nowadays probably) is search engine optimization or SEO. The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress and so it is important for us to discuss SEO in regards to WordPress.

WordPress does a great job with SEO from a standalone perspective, but there are a lot of other things, such as plugins that can make it better. Using just WordPress you can add meta tags, insert keywords, optimize images for SEO via titles and captions, and change the permalinks structure of the website to use full titles as the URL.

But there are some limitations, which could be for simplicity sake and to not confuse new users, or it is because for most people it simply isn’t necessary.

Luckily for power users and fanatics about SEO WordPress has a huge set of available plugins, both free and for pay that can enhance your websites search engine ranking.

Check out these 4 plugins to start on your search engine ranking journey!

All-in-One SEO
This is considered THE SEO plugin for most people. The plugin sits on the post and page editor and provides users with options for title, description, keywords, and more allowing you to customize what shows up in the Title (rather than just using the default title). An extremely handy plugin and best of all it is free, so there is no reason to not have this installed and working for your blog.

WP Google Analytics
Site metrics aren’t normally talked about when talking directly about SEO plugins, but having a Google Analytics plugin that allows you to track where your traffic is coming from and from which keywords is a great way to refine your strategy and thinking about SEO. Seeing the real results will help motivate you to continue your SEO campaign. There are a few plugins to help with Google Analytics setup so make sure you search the plugins on WordPress.org to help you out.

Google Sitemap XML
This plugin allows you to generate a .xml sitemap to submit to Google Webmaster Tools to help Google crawl your site when it visits. An easy one time thing the plugin serves the purpose great and is a must have for a new or established site.

WP Auto Tagger

If you’re reading this site then you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with SEO and why it’s important for your website. SEO can be a little complicated. There are a lot of factors to consider when search engine optimizing your website, but there are a few universal quick tips you can keep in mind to help get you started.

Title Tags

The title of a page is the first thing any search engine sees when they look at that site. Your title should include keywords relevant to your site whenever possible. You never want to leave the title set to something generic like “home page”. Search engines see millions of pages with generic titles, and as such, having a generic title isn’t going to help search engines to place your page in the right search results pages.

Make Sure Your Page Loads Quickly

Clear your browser’s cache, and refresh your page. Did it load quickly, or did it hang for a few seconds? Repeat this experiment a few times over the course of a day, and see how well your site performs over time. If you’re page is loading quickly most of the time, you don’t have anything to worry about. If your page tends to hang for more than a couple of seconds, then you might want to consider switching hosting providers, or hiring a developer to pour over your code, and look for problems. If a page is unresponsive, search engines will rank it lower than if it loaded quickly.

Original Content

Make sure all of the content on your site is completely original. It’s OK if you’re quoting another article here and there, but if you’re copying entire articles, or running an article that you purchased from someone who sold it to multiple sites, you’re posting duplicate content. Search engines don’t look kindly on duplicate content, and if your site contains a lot of it, you will wind up at the bottom of search results quickly.

A fast-loading page with a strong title, and good, original content will do well on search engines. By taking the time to make sure your pages meet these criteria, you’re ensuring that your site will show up higher in search results. The higher you show up in search, the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get, the more profitable your site will be.

Creating SEO optimized content is important to online success. Including keywords relevant to your site in your content helps search engines to index, and rank your website so people can find you. You also have to remember that you’re writing your content to be read by your visitors as well.

When it comes to writing SEO friendly content, quality is more important than quantity. In other words, try to stick to a few well written, keyword rich pages than a lot of poorly written pages that just hammer keywords. The goal of any website is to make money. You need visitors to either buy your product, or click your ads in order to make money. If your content is confusing, or hard to understand, your visitors will lose trust in your site very quickly, and as a result, they won’t buy your products or click your ads – they’ll just leave your site without looking back. In other words, a high search rank means nothing if it’s paired with an equally high bounce rate.

Your writing can’t just be keyword heavy, it also has to keep your readers’ attention. One way to both emphasize your keywords, and keep your readers engaged is to use bold words. By using bold test, you’re drawing the reader’s eye to the text, and search engines also give more weight to bold text. So, by highlighting text in bold, you are ensuring that your readers will pay closer attention to it, and search engines will give it more weight.

If you are planning to include pictures in your content, make sure to use them effectively for SEO purposes. Include a caption for each picture, and make sure you give each file a strong name that describes what’s in the picture well. One thing a lot of people overlook when adding pictures to their content is the alt tags. In your code, the alt tags give you a place to put a description of the image that will pop up when the image is moused over. That text might not be immediately apparent to the reader, but search engines use it to help rank both the page, and the image for search purposes.

Creating quality content requires a balance of elements that readers are going to find useful, and elements that a search engine is going to find useful. If you can learn to walk that line, you will create content that is both attractive to readers, and SEO friendly.

Everyone knows that SEO, or search engine optimization is important for the content on their site. That’s fairly common knowledge at this point. What a lot of people don’t realize is that your images can bring you a great deal of search traffic too. People are constantly searching for images for many different reasons, and if you can optimize your images to take advantage of those searches, you can bring more traffic to your site.

The first thing you should do is be sure that your images are all named correctly. Give your images names that reflect what is pictured in the image. For example, the picture above of the JPEG icon is named “jpeg icon.png”. If you are using a photograph, make sure the image name describes what’s going on in the picture. For example, a photograph of two guys playing with a Frisbee should have a name along the lines of “two guys playing Frisbee in a park.jpg” Don’t be afraid to have a long image name. It’s more important that the image name be descriptive than short. Try to include spaces between the words in the image name. If your content management won’t support spaces, put dashes instead. It’s important that the words be separated so that search engines can easily recognize them.

You should also take the time to fill out the alt tags for your images. whenever you mouse over an image, you will see some text displayed. That text is dictated by what is written in the alt tag for an image. Again, be descriptive in your alt tags. Include a little more detail in the alt tags than you did in the image name. In the example above the image name was “two guys playing Frisbee in a park.jpg”. In this example you might want your alt tags to contain the text “two guys playing Frisbee in a park on a bright summer day” That way, there is more text relevant to the contents of the image associated with it.

Remember, search engines can’t see your images. They’re relying on you to describe the images in a way that they can understand. Giving your images strong names, and including relevant information in your alt tags makes it easy for search engines to understand what is going on in your pictures so that they can do a better job of placing them in search results. By taking the time to optimize your images for search, you are ensuring better search traffic to your site over time.

We’ve talked a little about what SEO is and how you can use it in a broad sense to generate traffic for your site. Now we’re going to get into the finer details of optimizing a website for search.

Don’t make your site more complicated than it needs to be. Flash apps, podcasts, and videos might look nice, and feel fancy, but search engines can’t index the information in them. If you’re going to include those things on your site, be sure to use text to reiterate the information in your media files. Search engines can’t hear your podcast, or watch your videos, so it’s very important that the information in them be converted to test, and placed on your site. We’re not suggesting that you transcribe your entire podcast, but rather that you write a couple paragraphs detailing what’s covered in the podcast.

It’s also important to provide a well organized navigation system on your site. Consider adding a nav bar just under the header that includes links to all the major sections of your site. If your site is broken down into a lot of subsections, add a drop down menu for each section that shows all of its subsections. You should also add a sitemap to your website. Not only does it make it easy for your visitors to find what they’re looking for,  but it also makes it easier for search engines to index your site.

Be careful about the quality and quantity of links on your site. If you have more than 50 links on any given page, you may be damaging your search rank. Also, keep an eye out for broken links on your site. From time to time, a page on another site will get deleted, or moved. If you have a link leading to content that isn’t there anymore, it reflects poorly on your site. There are a lot of free link checkers out there that will browse your site, and give you a report on the status of your links. If you’re using WordPress, there are several highly effective plugins available to help you avoid broken links.

The most important thing of all is to have good, original content on your site. Your content should be keyword rich, and each page should be completely original. If you have two pages with near identical content on your site, search engines will view them as duplicate content, and your search rank will be damaged because of it.

By keeping a well organized site with a lot of quality content, you can boost your search rank significantly. Keep your links up to date, and make sure there’s some text to go with your media, and your site will climb it’s way to the top of any major search engine in no time.

Making money by using article marketing can be a little tricky, but under the right circumstances, it can also be very profitable. Before you jump into article marketing, take a minute and think about what you’re marketing, and what you want to get out of article marketing. Do you have a website of your own? Do you sell products of your own? Are you relying on affiliate programs to generate income?

If you’re starting with a clean slate, the very first thing you should do is set up a website. If you produce a product of any sort, an site dedicated to that product will do just fine. If not, consider launching a blog, or other informative site that you can post affiliate links on. Whatever you decide to do with your website, make sure it has the potential to generate income. After all, what’s the point of marketing your site if it can’t bring in any profit?

Now that you know what you’re marketing, it’s time to start writing some articles. Sites like Ezine Articles let you post articles on a variety of different topics. Each article you post can be an indirect advertisement for you, your website, and any products or services you might offer. It’s important to keep that in mind as you write your articles. Each article should contain a link to your site. That’s pretty obvious. What might not be so obvious, is that each article should also be SEO friendly. Your article (and by proxy, your site) will get some attention from regular visitors to the article directory you submitted your work to, but a good portion of your traffic is going to come from search engines. Remember to use keywords in the title of the article whenever possible, and the body of the article should be keyword rich.

Having an SEO friendly article on an article directory like Ezine Articles can help you in a few different ways. If the article itself is SEO friendly, more people will find it, and some of  those people will click through to your site. Sites like Ezine Articles have bene around for a while, and as such, they have a fairly high volume of traffic, and they also tend to come up high in search all on their own. By having a site like that linking to your site, you’re increasing your own search rank.

By writing SEO friendly articles on article directories, and linking them back to your own site, you can bring in some traffic, and boost your search rank all in one shot. At the end of the day, more traffic leads to more revenue, and that’s never a bad thing.