Plain and simple. text is the backbone of SEO, articles are the gathering of text. Search engine spiders love useful, unique content. Period.

Example: I have a niche site, and the top 3 highest ranked pages in regards to Google are well researched articles that contain several longtail keywords. These pages get indexed fasted, and get the most hits. I even climbed through 30,000 existing entries for a particular key phrase on Google to the number one spot in a week.

A simple hyper link within the article to a resourceful niche related book on amazon generates consistent income on a monthly basis. 100 clicks a month on that one little bit of anchor text! Doesn’t sound like much, but thats just one page on a very big site.

SEO works, it always will. If you research well using Wordtracker or a similar service and use your research when compiling your content, meta description, title, category names, and you update your sites content at least once a week, you will be kicking butt in the search engines within 90 days.

Interesting thing about SEO is I find that I optimize for one keyword phrase and find that I rank for others I wasn’t targetting

SEO does work but it takes time and quite a bit on know how to make it work