As the e-commerce industry has grown and grown into a multi-billion dollar industry so internet marketing and the science of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become more and more important to online marketeers and companies alike.

Did you know that over 80% of online sessions begin with a search on one of the popular search engines, mainly Google? It probably will not be of surprise to you therefore, that a number 1 position in Google's search results can mean potentially thousands of dollars for a profitable keyword.

The difference between a number 1 position on the first page of Google results and a 5th position is vast, and even more so between the first and second page - note, that hardly any of us using Google progress to the third page of results.

When you do a search in Google, the search engine returns you a set of results that it has deemed are the most relevant and important for your search. How it determines this is based on a ranking algorithym that is kept secret to Google. However, by experience and trial, internet marketeers have learned what is important to the algorithym in terms of ranking and this science has become known as SEO (or Search Engine Optimization).

Your web page will be considered more important if it has links to it from other websites, especially if those sites have related content and the pages that the links are on contains content related to yours. This is especially true if the anchor text is also related to your subject matter.

Google is basically an online popularity contest, the more inbound links your page has from other web-pages, especially pages on other related websites, the more votes it has in effect and the more important it is deemed to be. Furthermore, if those links are formed by anchor text which matches or contains words related to your page content then those votes become even more important.

Article marketing has become one very popular way to generate substantial one-way links targeting your web page. Basically, the aim is to write some useful related articles, include your backlinks that have anchor text related to your niche and post these articles to online article directories. These pages then get indexed by Google and hopefully you get your backlinks.

You need to keep in mind that search engines do not like duplicate content. Think about it, if all Google did was present you with search results that just had duplicate content then you would stop using it - its Google's job to filter this out and they are pretty good at it. This could be quite a labour intensive task but there are plenty of online services now that will submit your article for you and help you create mutliple unique versions that the search engines are more likely to find favour with.

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