confused newbie on article marketing and article marketing robot

I hear you. :p

Article marketing isn't much to do with SEO, anyway, really. The only backlinks that really help your SEO much are backlinks from relevant sites, so backlinks from article syndication to relevant sites are worth something, but not worth nearly as much as the relevant traffic that you can get from those sites without a search-engine being your proximal source of traffic. Article directory backlinks are worthless.

Here's a one-post overview of "how article marketing really works".

Personally, I'd advise you not to put too much of your time and effort into trying to attract "organic SERP's" traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried in 8 entirely different niches over the whole of the last 4 years - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (just because of all the high rankings I've got, incidentally, from article syndication to relevant sites) but I'd certainly hate to have to make a living from that traffic! :p