Article marketing is a method that many people use to reach new visitors, to grow their web site's audience, and to bring traffic back to their web site. When you are writing an article about your niche, you will want to do "keyword research" before you even start typing.

Keyword research is what will help to ensure that your article is not competing against too many other web sites, and in turn this will help to make sure that your article is visible and easy to find for people who are looking for your subject matter. Here is how this works.

Let's take "dog training" as an example. Go to Google - the most popular search engine - and type "dog training", all in quotes and click search. You want to put it all in quotes because this tells Google that you only want to look at web sites that have this exact phrase on them. Otherwise you could come across an article that says "I was walking my dog past a park the other day and saw a bunch of baseball players doing spring training" or something like that.

Now, when you type in "dog training" on Google, you will come up with 10.3 MILLION competing sites - sites that have that exact phrase in it. Oh no. You will NEVER appear on the first page of Google for dog training. You probably won't appear on the hundredth page. You're doomed, right? Time to just give up? Not so fast. Think like a customer - a person who wants information about dog training.

Type in "how to train your dog to heel" - now you've got 116,000 competing sites. Believe it or not, this is not so tough - write a few articles with new, fresh content and you are very likely to appear on the first page of google, maybe the second page at worst. Now type in "housebreak my dog". Only 1,570 competing sites. Type in "Stop dog chewing" - and you will find that there are only 14,200 competing sites that use that same phrase. Incidentally this works for all search engines, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

You always want to make sure that you use narrower more targeted phrases in your articles. This is how you compete against other web sites in the same niche as you. What you want to do is come up with a list of related phrases that do not have too many competing web sites.
Use a few of those phrases in each article. This will ensure that you reach ultra targeted visitors and you will not have many other web sites to compete against.

Incidentally if you type in a phrase that has NO competing web sites - that is not actually a good thing. What that means is that there is no money and no audience for that particular phrase. You want to see that other people have web sites featuring that phrase. Any niche that is capable of generating money has a bunch of web sites catering to it. If no one is bothering to go after that niche there is definitely a reason. So use these keyword research tips before starting to write your articles, and you will see much greater traffic coming back to your site in a very short period of time.