Been reading up on SEO? If so, you know that there are one of two major strategies for bumping up your website on the search engines. One is onpage optimization, which involves plumping up your website's headlines, subheads, alt image tags and content with popular keywords. The other is offpage optimization, which, although not talked about nearly as much, will drastically improve your rank if done the right way.

Offpage SEO works like this:

To improve your SEO rank and increase traffic to your site, you need to get more popular websites to link to you. This is called inbound linking.

Websites are ranked 1 to 10 for Page Rank; one being the least popular and 10 being the most popular. If you're just starting out, you're probably a 1 or a 2, but you want to be at least a 6 and who knows... maybe one day a "perfect 10!"

Just like real-life office hobnobbers, your little website is going to have to do some shmoozing with those big league websites to get noticed. How can you give your site some help? Just as you feared: you must first research whose site is ranking higher than you are for your selected keywords. Then you must email them and ask if they'll place your website link on their site.

Now when you ask people with highly visible websites if they can add your URL to their list, what do you think they typically say? "Sure, for a small fee..." (But more likely a not-so-small fee). So now we're talking about money, and nobody wants to lay out cash, especially if they're just starting out.

For this reason, you may be interested to learn: there's a new wave in offpage optimization that does not involve researching other people's websites OR emailing people OR negotiating link placement fees.

It's Article Marketing.

Simply stated, Article Marketing is distributing keyword-rich articles that include your name, professional author bio and URL link to other websites that display the articles as content. Then, publishers come by and pick up that content to place on THEIR websites.

Now, let that sink in for a moment and then remember the goal of offpage optimization: to get better ranking sites to link back to your URL. Article marketing covers this easily. How so?

As an article marketer, you can distribute hundreds of keyword-loaded articles to top ranking article content sites like EzineArticles.com. EACH TIME you post an article on a site like this, your article gets indexed in their content BY KEYWORD and your URL is listed along with it. That's with EVERY article you write.

It's also worth noting, that when you choose to showcase your work on a highly reputable, top ranking site like EzineArticles.com, you get the added advantage of their expertly designed and fully search engine optimized website template to help push you higher on the search engines.

A third point: EzineArticles.com is the number one choice for real live internet marketers to post their articles, pick up other authors' articles to use in their emailed ezines, and generally affilate with for all things article marketing. So if you wanted to start getting your name out there and known by all the right people, posting your expert articles on EzineArticles.com might be a pretty good way to do it.

Still not convinced that article marketing with a top ranking site is an incredible offpage optimization tool for your site? Submit four articles and then do a Google search on your name. Tell me what comes up. Then... when you're ready to take full advantage of this incredible opportunity: create a full-scale article marketing campaign that includes keywords and highly targeted copy... submit to the highest ranking article distribution sites... and watch your website rocket up the ranks!

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

Dina Giolitto is the author of ARTICLE POWER: Create Dynamite Web Articles and Watch Your Sales Explode... a 49-page manual covering every aspect of article marketing on the web. Learn about article marketing, copywriting and more at http://www.wordfeeder.com