When you want to increase your online Internet sales, you first need to drive targeted traffic to your website. To do so, you need to employ the right combination of search engine marketing and advertising strategies. Your efforts might include pay per click ads, email marketing campaigns, and press releases. Often overlooked, however, is the role that content articles play in effective search engine marketing and website traffic building.

What is a content article? On the surface, it is a written document posted on the Web that provides the reader with information. Unfortunately, such a document won't help drive targeted traffic to your website. You see, effective content articles, are much, much more than simply the written word posted on a website. They are masterful marketing tools that are optimized to be relevant to your target audience and distributed in such a way as to populate the Web, always including backlinks to your website. In essence, effective content articles take on a life of their own, by being replicated on many websites and always - without exception - including links back to your website. Content articles serve to point the way to your website, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while not taking up real estate on your server.

There are three primary differences between content articles that are effective search engine marketing tools and those that are not. The first is that effective content articles - those that search engines will pick up and other websites will publish - are original, well written, and interesting. The second is that effective content articles are keyword optimized, and the third is that the optimized articles are distributed to high-traffic article content hubs, where they will be replicated by webmasters with backlinks intact.

While writing comes easily to some, for most people it does not. In addition, there are too many articles published on the Web that are stuffed with keywords but provide no real information. For these reasons, you should consider retaining the services of a search engine marketing and advertising company to provide you with well-written articles that are original and interesting.

When looking for a search engine marketing and advertising company to provide you with content articles, the criteria you should use are:

1. Does the company guarantee well-written and edited original content articles?

2. Can the company effectively optimize keyword search terms to create the targeted traffic that you need?

3. Does the company regularly submit content articles to article directories, and if so, do they have a low or negligible percentage of rejected articles? (If a company submits articles but they are rejected by article directories, that's an indicator that the articles are poorly written, unoriginal, or uninformative.)

4. Will the company also host your article on its own website, and encourage other websmasters to replicate the article as is, with your keywords in place and a backlink to your website?

Content articles are an unbeatable way to generate links, boost your search engine rankings, find new prospects, and open up a flood of targeted traffic direct to your website. Content articles are an essential part of search engine marketing and, when done properly, they can have a tremendously positive effect on your online business!

Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International, one of the worlds MOST popular internet marketing companies on the web. Learn more about Content Articles Key to Marketing or Majon's Shopping - General directory