It is well known that article marketing can be a very good source of traffic to your website. Writing articles and submitting them to EzineArticles.com and a few other major web article directories has done wonders to the traffic to my site. I mentioned it already in another of my articles, so I will not talk about it here anymore.

A casual reader of this piece might, however, want to know why article marketing is such a great way to drive traffic to one's site. It is so for two major reasons.

Firstly, articles submitted to EzineArticles.com and other major directories are often picked up by many other smaller directories, sometimes of specialized nature, such as dedicated to affiliate marketing, SEO, or investing.

Secondly, as is well known, Google, the dominant search engine, has developed a liking for articles submitted to EzineArticles.com and gives them good, high rankings.

Many such articles quickly end up on the first page of Google when you search for keywords relevant to the articles' content, and, in particular, to their titles. This is not true for all articles, but varies depending on how competitive the keywords you search for are. If the search for a specific keyword produces less than 500,000 pages in Google, chances are your article containing the keyword in question will be featured on the first page of Google usually within a day or two since it was posted on the EzineArticles.com website. However, more competitive keywords may never get your article on the coveted first page of Google.

It would certainly be interesting to know how long such articles stay on the first page of Google. To this end, I have done some experiment to learn a bit more about it.

Roughly speaking, and probably not surprisingly at all, this depends again on how competitive your keywords are. One of my articles with a keyword that produces about 370,000 pages in Google when searched for, stayed on the first page of Google between May 25th and June 22nd, 2007, that is about 4 weeks. During this time, it climbed as high as to spot #7. Another of my articles, which first appeared on the first page of Google on April 22nd is still on it as of today, June 26th. You can find it there if you search for its most relevant keyword that pulls out of Google about 175,000 pages. As you see, this keyword is much less competitive than the other one. No wonder thus that the article containing it has a stronger staying power.

You would probably like to know if Yahoo! Search treats articles submitted to EzineArticles.com as well as Google does. The answer is yes, but only when it comes to articles featuring less competitive keywords. Only such articles stand a chance to appear on the first page of Yahoo! Search. For instance, the more competitive of my articles mentioned earlier never made it on the first page of this search engine, while the other one is still on it having reached position #5 at some point in the past.

It turns out that Yahoo! Search is too choosy to accommodate many of the keywords which would be granted a spot on the first page of Google if featured in articles submitted to EzineArticles.com.

More articles of this nature can be found in the Eclectic section of my site at http://www.eminimethods.com/Eclectic.html.