The simple answer is, yes you do have to write lots of articles, or pay someone to write articles, if you want to get a good page rank for your website, or for your other articles.

You may be able to convince someone to link to your site from the home page of their related website, but usually you will have to create quality pages of your own, and the easiest way to do that is to write articles on various article writing sites.

Different article writing sites have different policies on self promotional links, but you can write a review in the third person, if you don't want to seem overly commercial, or you can just make the link from relevant link text, and not even mention your website.

A lot of these sites will pay you, and Factoidz is my favorite, but some other good ones are Triond, HubPages, Associated Content, Squidoo, and Ehow.

If you don't care about being paid, you might want to try Ezine and Go Articles, because some people think they are more trusted by Google, even though they have a similar page rank as the paid ones I mentioned.

I'm not entirely clear on all the page rank algorithms, and nobody is, but basically you need to focus on high page rank back links to your main site, and to build up the page rank of those pages, you need to make back links to them as well.

I don't actually have a website of my own, I just write here on Factoidz, but I make back links to my articles here from many different social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Google Buzz, Yahoo Buzz, Bebo, Blurpalicious, Blinklist, Linked In, Netvibes, My AOL, She Told Me, Typepad, Wordpress, RedGage etc, using a free downloaded toolbar called Add This.

I then make back links to the back links from the same sites, and go on to write articles with different titles but similar keywords on Triond and HubPages, and I sometimes make back links from Ezine and Go Articles, if I really need an extra SEO boost.

The thing to remember is that Google has an algorithm for everything, and one of them is that they like to see a gradual increase in the number of back links over time.

SEO is not an exact science, because it mostly has to be worked out by trial and error, but I would suggest that you gradually make back links from as many different sites as you can over time, concentrating on the high page rank ones, but not only on them, and remember that you need to boost the page rank of those sites as well, for it to rub off on your main page.

Factoidz doesn't really like a lot of self-serving links, but then that's because they get companies to pay them for their writers to write product reviews. A writer can get paid up to $10 for a good product review, and that's after Factoidz take their cut, so even one article can be worth a lot to some people.

I sometimes write articles for people's websites, but I prefer to write about whatever I find interesting at the time. I'm still learning SEO, but I can see the massive potential to make money if done right.

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