by Ken Nadreau and Hubert Daul

Article Marketing has really taken off lately. Virtually thousands of articles are written and submitted every single day. This is mostly due to Google AdSense and the search engine's keen interest in relevant content.

So everyone's creating high yielding content for their AdSense sites and building significant back links by submitting their articles to high ranking article directories.

Profits are being made, people are being instantly turned into experts in their field, and the search engines are totally loving the constant flow of new content they can show their customers.

But there's one definite way you could completely "blow" the whole thing for yourself, and unfortunately far too many people are doing it lately.

You see, the key factor that makes all of this work is relevance. The search engines want to know that when someone does a search through their system, they'll get exactly what they're looking for. It's what all this talk of changing algorithms are all about.

The search engines are on a quest to find the best way to provide the most relevant material for any specific queries put in front of them, and so they keep changing their algorithms to fulfill their goal.

All we have to do is make it as easy as possible for the search engines to find this specific relevance on our sites and in the articles we write, and we have a marriage made in heaven.

Now when we speak of relevance, there are a number of factors involved. Sure, if you're hoping to get your site listed a the top in the search engines for "baking cookies," your site better be all about baking cookies, and you'd better have a lot of content about it too.

But there's more to it than that.

Even the links on your site should be about baking cookies because the search engines take those into consideration as well when they judge your site's over all relevance. In fact, if your site is about baking cookies and you accept links from sites about car parts, you're actually hurting the relevance of your site and lowering your page ranking.

Keeping this in mind now, there's a seriously unfortunate habit a lot of article writers have gotten into. There are just so many articles being written and submitted to the article directories, that many aren't paying attention to where their articles are being posted.

Most article directories have category choices that separate the content of their sites into specific groupings. These groupings are seen by the search engines as individual "mother lodes" of content. But this true only if these groupings or categories are actually relevant to one specific topic.

Which is why article directory owners have to work so feverishly to maintain the integrity of their categories.

So if you're submitting articles to them just for sake of submitting, you're not only giving them more work, but you're actually wasting your time and working against the intended purpose of article submitting in the first place.

If your articles get posted into the wrong category, it won't help you because your back link will be in an unrelated place. Plus the value of the category will diminish due to your article about "car parts" being in a category about "baking cookies."

This problem has reached a critical point. Either those submitting articles will have to work at being more accurate in category choices, or the article directories will have get smarter so they can catch irrelevant articles before they ruin things for everyone.

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