This practice highly benefits the promotion of a site. For first and obvious definition, an article is any kind of text or multimedia content with specific information inside, from tutorial to tips and whitepapers. It's up to the writer to define the format, the scope, the presentation. An article is a clear image representing part of what your site is about, of your experience, of what you sell, of your goals. But what is more important than that, is the content itself. It is essential that your reader learn something new when reading your article. For more information about how to create a good article, you can consult this excellent article: http://tools.devshed.com/c/a/How-To/How-to-Optimize-Your-Online-Articles. Be careful, your article can't be more shiny than your site!

A second definition, that sometimes makes article writers forget about the first, is that an article is a mean of exclusive promotion for your site. And it is true, writing an article is an excellent way of advertising your area of expertise and create a quality backlink in reference to your site. Unfortunately, some writers prefer to achieve the link placement more than the writing the article itself. It results in poor content for the article, with no specific or new information. Worse, some pseudo authors copy articles from bases of articles, paste them in other bases and change the name at the bottom!
Other bad practice methods are more insidious and have to do with article base engine themselves which have the habit to show the more recent article first. Writer that want to be read constantly have no other choice than to produce a lot of diverse and regular article, and the more the article base is important, the more this task looks impossible! So some writers decide to write the same article over and over again, creating tons of duplicated information, changing the title and some terms in the text, to pass automated script validations when the article is submitted. You would be surprised on how many so-called reputable authors do this! In my opinion, however they gain some exposure, this gives them a very bad image, and they cannot hope to gain regular readers with such practices.

You can choose to place your article on your own site, or blog to gain some content, but this won't give any backlink. Before placing your article in any base of articles, be sure you respect their guidelines and that the links you will place on your article to your site don't have the attribute "nofollow". It would be too bad not to benefit for the free backlinks and lose positions in our constant race for PR!

There are different names for links: one-way linking, three-way-linking, reciprocal-linking, automated-linking, back linking, etc... In reality, a link is when a pointer (A HREF) is created from a site to another site (external link). Different technics for linking appear in complement of this main concept.
Links from other sites to your site (backlinks) are the more important in SEO strategies. A link from other sites to your site, when your site links to this site in return (reciprocal-link) seems to be less valuable. Backlinks from high pagerank (PR) rated sites are more important than backlinks from lower PR rated sites. How, why and how much, are however questions that remain without any answers, since SE make a point in keeping their calculations algorithm a secret that is changing from time to time.

It is important to consider the following:

Backlinks are important in the determination of the PR of your page, but it's not the only factor taken in account. The more quality backlink you have, the more chance you have to get a high PR though. Links are also important to generate traffic to your site, and even if we don't understand how links are related to PR, we can easily measure and understand the difference between links depending on:

The place where they put your link on their page. A webmaster can put your link on a page that is not linked to the main site, or in a "garbage link page" (those are never seen by anyone), and even if it's a good PR site, this link would be useless. Or they can put your link on their main page visible for everybody.

The number of accesses the site where your link is placed gets, is also as important. So, making it simple, the higher the PR is, the more statistical probability you have to be followed.

The relevance of the site where your link is placed. If you sell flower and have a link in a site selling cars, your link will be followed only by chances. Put you link on a non-ethical site, and your site might suffer from bad advertising. Try to exchange link only with sites related or complementary to yours, avoiding to give away your customers to the competition!!!

Same rules of common sense apply, as in traditional marketing.

So it would be important to spend a significant amount of time building linkexchange, finding appropriate sites, sending email to the webmasters to exchange links with them, waiting for them to answer and looking day after day, if your link is still available in their site. It's even more complicated when you try to make a 3-way link exchange.
To cut on this unproductive time, searching for link partners (well, while your are searching your site is not evolving), there are some third parties who can help you finding those specific partners.

I would separate those third parties in 2 kinds:

• Manual link exchange third parties: It's like a Directory organized in categories in where you can choose sites that are already participating in the link exchange program. As you tell the third party you are interesting, they will contact their webmasters to check if he is also interesting. When everyone aggree, both place links, and the third party manage the continuity of link existence on both websites. Easy, quick and safe! I use http://www.linkexchange.net to perform this operation, a very intuitive linkexchange program.


• Automated link exchange third parties: Here, it's even more simple. If you have a host with server scripting capabilities, just place a tiny script on a page linked to your site and it's done. You are automatically linked to everybody participating on the program or to the categories you chose to be linked with. Like this, each time a new site participates in the exchange program, it is linked to your site automatically. Some people say, automated link exchange programs would have your site banned from google. There's no way for a crawler to check if a link has been automatically or manually generated. It could at most see the extension of the file containing the links and determine if it's a script (asp, jsp, php ...) or a static (html) file, but even this can be masked using rewriting rules. So there are no dangers coming from automated link exchange programs, but keep in mind, that the more the third party does for you, the more it has to be trustworthy (automated link exchange won't see if you link to your competitors). I use for my site http://www.toptenserp.com (automated one-way linking).

It's important to identify your site with keywords that nobody has! But logically, if nobody has them, then nobody might search for them! On the contrary, if you use obvious keywords, then obviously high PR sites use them already and might very well appear before you in search results!


Keyword optimizing is like cooking: the right mixture between ingredients or the sauce tastes bad!

You can begin to cook something with this: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. I believe that Keyword optimization is more about intuition and systematic verification on a tool like this, than applying some predetermined rules.
As a result, beware of those SEO companies proposing you first pages on SE results. I can do it too! If your site is about Computer Programming, and I put "Shiny Computer Programming", I have some very high chances to rank much better than "Computer programming" alone! But who will ever search for those keywords?

Submitting a sitemap is not a direct method of promotion, however this will help google to crawl your website properly by submitting to them an xml file with the URL on your site you want to be indexed by the SE.

The structure of one URL can look like the following:

where we can see 4 paramater tags, one mandatory (loc) and 3 optionals (lasmod, changefreq, priority). To have a complete definition of what is required to build a sitemap you can see http://www.sitemaps.org.
You can easily make a sitemap by using free online tools (http://www.webrickco.com/buildsitemap.php or http://www.xml-sitemaps.com or desktop tools (http://www.sitemapbuilder.net). The problem begins when your site is to big for a sitemap to be generated by those conventional means. It is recomanded that an xml file containing a sitemap does not exceed 50000 or 10mb. Reaching those numbers, a sitemap index will have to be created and the sitemap divided in several xml files.
Anyway, be aware that a site with 50000 links will take several hours to be generated!

You can submit your sitemap at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps (You will have to sign in). Then google webmaster tools will provide you with index results for your sitemap. Unfortunately, you will noticed that google indexes very few URL each time your sitemap is downloaded. This might take a while before your sitemap is completely indexed.