One of the essential keys to successful article marketing is by writing an article that is found and indexed “highly” by the search engines. The reason why is that you want people who are interested in your topic to be able to find your content easily by doing an internet search for your keywords. This is what we call an organic search.

So for example, if you write articles on natural dog food, you want your target audience to be able to type in “natural dog food” in their search box and your site, blog, or articles are listed in the top 10 results for that keyword phrase.

In order to achieve this result, you must learn to optimize your articles and article titles with the keywords that your prospects naturally search for. This is called search engine optimization a.k.a. SEO.

Of course there are many companies and SEO experts out there who charge hundreds to thousands of dollars to help get business owners on Google’s “page 1″, but let me tell you that the average online entrepreneur does not need to go this route. Leave that to the large companies with the big marketing budgets.

You can get on the road to article marketing SEO success quickly when you follow these steps that I’ve outlined for you today:

1. Learn Your Market
It’s important before you attempt to optimize any of your articles with keywords and long-tail keyword phrases that you know HOW your market searches for your topic online. This is extremely important and it will differentiate you from the amateurs. The first way to do this is to first think about how you search for your information on this topic. Think like an everyday web visitor, not the “expert” that you are in your niche.

2. Do Your Keyword Research
The second way to achieve a more statistical result is to do keyword research. Using free tools such as Wordtracker and Google’s free keyword tool, you can discover what keyword phrases your potential customers are using to find information on your topic.

This works by first researching a more broad keyword phrase such as “dog food” and then using one of the keyword tools to give you a list of more targeted keywords related to the general one such as: natural dog food, organic dog food, holistic dog food, homemade dog food, etc.

3. Place Your Keywords Strategically - (Sort of:)
The next step to article marketing SEO success is to make sure that you use your keywords strategically in your article. First, your keyword phrase “natural dog food” needs to be in the title of your article.

Second, your keyword phrase needs to be somewhere in the first to second paragraph of your article. This reinforces that this phrase is indeed the topic of your article to the search engines.

Third, you should also mention the keyword phrase somewhere later in the body of the article, again reinforcing the importance of the keyword to the search engines, but it’s important to NOT stuff your article with your keywords.

So I always suggest to article marketing folks, to simply write about their topic naturally. Do not put a tremendous amount of focus on keyword placement or you will mention your phrases too much and probably get your articles rejected from article directories and looked at as a “spammer” from the rest of the web.

In conclusion, proper article marketing SEO is a key ingredient to your long-term article marketing success. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but its something that you need to do in order to see tangible results from all your article writing efforts.

Ready to learn more article writing tips, and article marketing, link building, and SEO strategies to build traffic to your site? Then I invite you to grab my (Lisa Angelettie’s) newly revised multi-media article marketing success toolkit over at: http://articlemarketingsuccesskit.com

I look forward to working with you:)