Articles are one of internet marketers' and link builders' worst-kept best-kept secrets.

We all know that to be seen on the internet we need links coming into our sites and pages. A whole industry has grown up around getting those links and maintaining links.

A lot of this has to do with submissions to internet directories and exchanging links with other sites. But anywhere you have reciprocal (two-way links) devalues the worth of the link in he search engines' eyes... And the important factor here is getting your web pages indexed by the search engines. The real links that are worth getting are one-way links from popular sites that, themselves, rank well in Google.

It's possible to pay for these links, but Google have been cracking down on link payment schemes of late and many sites or pages who were engaged in link purchasing have seen their search engine rankings tumbling. It looks like there are no real short-cuts in link building.

If this is the case, what's the answer? Actually there's a very simple answer out there and it's one that the big internet marketers and those getting lots of traffic to their sites are all using...

The writing and publishing of articles has been used to advertise and sell things since the middle ages and it really took off with the invention of the printing press and moveable type. It was only natural that this advertising medium should be transplanted to the internet as well. Articles on the web began as ways of advertising products then they became ways of adding content to websites. With the growth of eZines and other content-based media articles became more and more important.

Sites where people could post and publish articles began to appear on the web. These would allow you to submit an article which could then be copied by others for use in their web publications. The sites themselves make money via advertising whilst the authors firstly get the benefit that comes from recognition as an expert in their feed. But there is also another, very important factor in the submission of articles.

Most article sites allow you to include up to 3 URLs in that section of the article which talks about you, the author. These three URLs can all be back to your own website which means that each article you submit to an article directory gives you three in-bound links to the web page(s) of your choice. These could well be your hub pages.

As you get more experienced at writing articles you should be able to easily write an article in 20 minutes or so (and a decent article at that). It should really be no problem for you to write and submit 4 articles in a week. That's 16 articles a month — over 200 articles a year. That means in a single year, writing just 4 articles each and every week you can get 600 links to the pages of your choice!

Even better you can write variants of the same article to different article directories. Never be tempted to send exactly the same article. The search engines label this as 'duplicate content' and the article submission directories frown upon it. Indeed, if caught doing this you account may be suspended and all your articles may be removed from the sites in question (for a little more information on various article sites' policies, see the Review of Article Sites).

I hope you can see that writing articles can be great for your reputation, but it can also be even better for the web pages you're promoting. And just in case you're daunted by the thought of writing articles you really don't have to be. After all, what are hubpages but articles in a slightly different guise?

I've been involved in article directories and article submissions for many years and I can prove that they really do produce results and are one of the best ways of getting your web pages noticed.

If you're going to start writing and submitting articles (and they don't have to be huge, 400 words is the average length) then I would recommend these sites as the ones worth submitting to:

ezinearticles.com A huge site with good page rank and quick turn around

celtnet articles A small but growing site with decent page rank, a very quick turn around and all articles are promoted via RSS feed

articledashboard.com A big site with good page rank and a reasonable turn aroun

goarticles.com articles are submitted instantly and you get URLs in the article body as well as the 'about the author' section

If you're clever you can even re-write the articles you've written so that they're unique and then submit them to even more article sites.

I've chosen these because you get published very rapidly and you will see a fast improvement in your page's rankings because of this. There are many more large and small article directories out there. But a lot of them take forever for your articles to get included.

Hopefully you've seen what articles can do for you and your hub and that you will now start promoting your articles using this fast and easy link-generation method.