You want more potential customers to your website. You want more back links to your website. You want better position in the natural search engine results. You want your products or services to become better know and your brand name to be recognized. All of these things are possible with a little work and the right knowledge. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques fill countless books being sold on the Internet and there are hundreds of companies and individuals who make a living selling their expertise in this area.

The SEO experts will tell you about on-page optimization, meta tags, keyword density and internal link structure. They will also tell you about off-page optimization, back links, relevant links, reciprocal links, high PR links. All of this information is important and should be addressed in your overall SEO endeavors. You want to cover all the bases in your goal to reach the front page of search results in the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) for your most important keywords.

But of all the techniques used for SEO, the most important today, are the back links or incoming links you have to your website. Your SEO endeavors will succeed or fail depending on how many other sites on the internet link back to your site. So how do you get other sites to link to your site? Write articles!

Now let's talk about writing articles to increase the incoming links to your site. While this method is still not widely known or used by the vast majority of website owners, it is one of the best ways to increase the incoming links to your site. First, it's free! If you can write even a little, you can produce an article that will increase your links and make your products, services or website more visible on the web. You don't want to write a sales letter. You want to write an article that is somehow related to what you sell or the service you offer. You should write an article that shares your knowledge in a particular area and provides valuable information to your reader.

If you can't write a lick or would rather spend your time doing other things, there are many places on the Internet where you can hire a writer to do the job for you. One of the better sites out there is elance.com, but there are many other sites you can chose from. You'll be surprised at how inexpensively you can have an article written for you. The going rate seems to be $10 to $20 an article. Of course you'll have to chose your writer carefully. Get some examples of the work they have done for others and pay close attention to the ratings they have from past customers. Make sure they understand you are looking for a ghost writer and that the articles must be original work. Also make sure it is understood that you will have exclusive rights to the article and they may not use this article for another client. After you have selected a writer to write your article, you must convey the subject and the kind of article you want him or her to write. Be as specific as possible to get the best results. The writer should also be willing to make changes if the first draft isn't exactly what you wanted. This is pretty standard but worth mentioning before the writing begins. Payment is usually made when the job is finished and you are satisfied with the results.

Ok, now you have an article or 10, what do you do with them? You submit your articles to Article Directories. There are hundreds of Article Directories on the Internet. They provide a service to writers and publishers. For article writers they will list your articles for free and provide a bio box at the bottom of the article where you can promote your product, service or website with links back to your site. These articles are then syndicated to publishers of blogs, ezines, newsletters and websites who are looking for content. Each time a publisher picks up your article they must agree to publish it with the bio box and the links back to your site. Over time, one well written article can bring you hundreds of back links to your site. This is a viral method of site promotion. Your article will spread like a virus over the Internet, giving you name and brand recognition and those most important incoming links.