Seach Engine Optimization increases the possibility that your site will show up in search results for a specific search. But how do you "plan your attack" to get the most out of article marketing? One tool is to create relevant articles that lead readers back to your site.

Here's your step-by-step guide:

STEP ONE - Choose the best keywords for your site.

What is your site about? For some business blogs this is an easy question to answer, but for others, it might be a little harder to pin down. Let's take a look at an example site. In this case we'll look at a photographer's site.

Perhaps the photographer offers a service, for instance, family portraits. The photographer wants to attract traffic to the website for anything and everything related to "family potrait photography" - so we choose this phrase as your keyword target.

STEP TWO -Catch the tiger by the tail

Now that you know exactly what your target is you can begin researching your keyword's LONG TAIL - the list of keywords that build upon your keyword target to create additional phrases. The long tail is the hundreds to thousands of keywords and key phrases that a site is found for, yet rarely noticed or exploited.

The principle of the Long Tail is the opposite of focusing on the top 10-20 keywords for marketing their sites. The "top keyword" concept has been pushed by companies whose business is built around increasing a site's ranking for 10-30 terms. The sticking point is that when you dig a little deeper you'll find that the referrals from search engines and the traffic they generate, you'll discover that the focus on those 10-30 search terms means you'll miss a majority of the market.

So taking our keyword target from above - family portrait photography - we can begin researching our keyword's LONG TAIL - the list of keywords that build upon your keyword target to create additional phrases. To complete this step, you will need to visit one of the many FREE keyword research tools available on the web. Here are some of the one's I've used with great success:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Here are the first few for "family portrait photography" -

family portrait photography
outdoor family portrait photography
family portrait photography berry
family portrait photography south coast
family portrait photography berry nsw

These keyword phrases are a great place to start since we can see that people are actively searching for these words. These are the words we'll use to create content for both our site as well as articles we'll share with other sites.

STEP THREE - Write your articles.

For many small business owners, writing a professional article is a daunting task. The good news is that there are plenty of resources if you're not willing or comfortable writing articles about a particular subject. If you do choose to hire someone, make sure they have experience writing SEO content.

At a loss for where to start, check out craigslist for your area and post an ad looking for help with SEO article writing. Chance's are you'll be inundated with pitches. Just ask for samples and look for writers willing to price their content in the $.05 to $.10 per word range. Some might even offer discounts for bulk orders.

If you decide you'd like to take a crack at writing your own content, remember to answer the five standard questions of any article: Who, what, where, why, and how. Sprinkle your keyword phrases as often as possible without making it absurd. Many websites offering help with keyword writing will say saturation rates of 10 to 20% are effective. While it is true, such a rate will mean that you'll end up with 50 keywords in a 500 word article. Clearly that won't be a very readable article and Google has been known to punish content or sites that keyword stuff. Taking that into consideration, usually a keyword saturation rate of 2-3% is a good amount. It will be an article that reads naturally, yet still accomplishes your goal.

STEP FOUR - Add your article to the right directories.

Directories are content collections where users submit content for free to leverage the sites search engine power. Here's a list of some popular directories:

www.EzineArticles.com
www.AssociatedContent.com
www.ArticleDashboard.com
www.GoArticles.com

My favorite directory is EzineArticles.com for a number of reasons, the least of which is that it lets you protect your content with backlinks back to your site in case other webmasters decide to publish your content on their site. You actually want others to publish your articles on their sites because the more people who publish your content on their sites, the more traffic you'll generate and the higher your Google page rank will rise

STEP FIVE - Continue to write conent for your own site with the same keywords and phrases as well as continue to write more articles for the directories. Writing one article will generate some interest, but the idea is to keep your site fresh with new, almost daily content additions. You can't just sit and wait for one article to do all the work. Search Engine Optimization isn't a one and done processs, but an ongoing plan to generate traffic through relevant content. SEO is a numbers game and the more often you submit new content, the more traffic your site will get.