To webmasters all around the globe it has become a great battle to see who can get the top positions on the search engines for specific keywords. These top positions are valued so highly for an obvious reason traffic. With so much competition for every single subject on the internet it is vital that your internet business ranks high on the search engines in your specific field and that you can get those crucial visitors that will make you successful.

Of course, if you have the money to spend, you can pay for a sponsored position on the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. However, not only do these positions cost a huge amount, but they are also still not as effective as the top spots which can only be obtained through genuine SEO (search engine optimization) techniques. The top spots on the major search engines are greatly respected and it definitely says something about your business if you manage to obtain them.

Writing articles is one of the most effective ways to improve your search engine positioning. And the great thing about it is that it is absolutely free. All it takes is a bit of time and effort to churn out a couple of articles but actually its not as tiresome as it sounds; once youre into the writing part the words just start to flow.

The reason that writing articles is so effective is that it greatly increases the number of incoming links from other websites. In your article resource box you should have included your website link. Say you submit your writing to 10 article directories and then from there 10 publishes from each article directory decide to show your article on their website. Immediately youve got 100 incoming one-way links. And dont think that your article would stop there. Many more publishers would see your article on other publishers sites and would then add it to their site and so on. In this way, writing articles is a great way to create an incredible viral source of visitors which keeps on expanding and expanding as time goes by. Google ranks a website with a lot of incoming links particularly highly. Yahoo and MSN also rate this quality very highly.

In addition, websites with incoming links from other sites of relevant subject matter are rated even more highly. You should have been writing articles on the same topic as that of your website and if you have done this then you can just about guarantee that the website that your article appears on will be similar to yours. So, not only have you got 100 incoming links, youve got 100 QUALITY incoming links. Nowadays with the number of websites trying to spam for keywords, the major search engines regard quality a lot higher than quantity.

Your articles are also very valuable to the webmasters who publish your work. Your articles are providing these webmasters with relevant content to display on their site for free and in this way they are unlikely to ever delete your article from their website. It is most likely going to be kept in their database for years to come. Therefore, if your article makes it on to 1000 web pages over a period of 3 months, this number can only keep growing because your articles will never be removed. The great thing about this is that you now have permanent incoming links to your website so it is a long term solution to search engine optimization.

In conclusion, writing articles to optimize for the search engines should be something that all webmasters think about. Not only is it free, but it is also extremely effective. So, if you arent writing articles, ask yourself why not? You can be sure that in the long term it will be worth it.