So you've coded up a great website. Got all the html front end looking spiffy, and got all the backend setup and ready to handle that influx of new people. You open the doors to the website, and watch the stats. Is that a tumbleweed going across your stats page?

Even the best website in the world needs both SEO and marketing. Not everyone has tens of thousands of dollars to throw at buying advertising, so there must be another way. And there is.

This way will both add visitors and build your backlinks, bringing you up in the SERPS. And it's easy, it's like having a conversation.

And the answer is...articles. Now, before you close this page and go looking further, read on for why this works like a charm, search engines love it, and it's free.

It just works - When you write those articles, you submit them to article directories. When accepted, you get a nice backlink, on the topic you got to choose, on the backlink anchor words you chose. Can't get much better than that...or can you? When other webmasters on your topic see your article, they can use it on their website for free (webmasters love great free quality content), and since it has your backlink, you get another backlink. Now, if 10 webmasters pick it up per article directory, and you put it on 25 article directories, that's 250 backlinks from webmasters, and 25 from the directories ... that's 275 backlinks from that short bit of work. Incredible, and it spoon-feeds your website to the search engines, which all absolutely love it.

The thing is, everybody benefits, both the authors and the webmasters that pick up the content, so it's free for everybody. It's a win-win-win situation.

Now, if you're lucky enough to have your article picked up by an eZine or something that gets distributed massively to many people directly, you are in for a really special treat.

If you have a website where you sell products, writing articles can help in even more ways than mere backlinks. Writing articles brands you as an expert in your topic. People who buy things like to go to the expert, the authority, and you get targetted traffic pre-dispositioned to listen to what you have to say and sell. You can see where this can easily lead to more sales, and more cash in your pocket.

The really nice thing about writing articles is that long after you've written an article, it's still out there working for you. The useful lifetime of an article is normally around 8 weeks to search engines, peaking at around 5-6 weeks. Write an article a day and you're golden.

As you can see, you stand to gain quite a bit from writing articles. You have a viral source of backlinks and advertising, your page rank goes up, you get targetted traffic, you become the go-to person for your topic, and it's free. In short, that's commonly called success.