The first step in getting your site noticed is to have a site that is designed in a way that is search engine friendly. That is called SEO (search engine optimized). This is mostly a web designing issue. We will assume that you are starting with an SEO optimized site. But that alone won’t give your site high rankings. To get the search engines to notice you, you need to understand them. The search engines’ whole purpose is to find quality content– that is what the internet is all about. Information. And the more content (related to your site’s most important keywords) that you have, the more that search engines will like you. They like to see sites that grow with quality content at a steady rate. They also like to see a lot of quality links from other sites on the Internet going to your site. This is where article marketing comes in. Let’s say you have a website that sells cameras. First you would want to expand your site beyond several pages. You could do that by adding lots of related products. Or you could review products. If you don’t want to do that yourself, look for free articles that review products for you. You could add other related free articles, such as how to use the product, where to display your photos, etc. Maybe start a blog on the topic. Blogs are great for promotion because they are constantly updated with fresh material. Where do you get all this fresh material? From article directories and article list servers. Because of the rapidly growing need for people to find and submit articles, the number of article directories sites are increasing. You can take advantage of this fact. You could write an article about you website’s subject (or take the material from what you have already written for your website). For example, how to find a quality camera or how to take great photos. Then you submit this article to article directories. I like to personally add my articles to a new directory every day. By doing this, you now have links all over the Internet leading to your site– links from the article directory, as well as links from everyone who publishes your article for free on their website, ezine or blog. Article marketing is now considered the method of choice for web marketing. It is the best way to get top placement with the search engines and to drive traffic to your site. It takes some time and effort to find and/or write and submit articles, but it is free. You can also pay a submission service to send your articles out to more directories than you would have time to do yourself. So, start thinking “content” if you want the search engines to notice you. This article may be freely copied as long as it is not modified and the resource box accompanies the article, together with working hyperlinks.