Article Marketing and SEO for Ecommerce Site

Hi everyone,

I have spent the last week reading hours of posts on article marketing and would be interested in learning this process in the context of ecommerce and SEO.

My understanding is that article marketing in it's own right is a marketing strategy, not necessarily something that sits under SEO which I follow. From what I've read, summarising what I've read by Alexa, Paul and others the steps include:

1. Create article
2. Post on own website and wait to be indexed
3. Syndicate article to relevant publishers who will post the article

Rule: Don't appear to sell or promote on the article and write for real people

The benefits of this include:
a) Generate traffic through people clicking on the links in the signature and content (if any exist)
b) Articles syndicated indirectly creates a backlink to the site which helps for SEO purposes

My questions are based around b) and how this actually works and how it can be improved.

Question 1 - My understanding is that by creating content with relevant anchor text for the keywords linking back to the site is more powerful. But considering the rule that you cannot sell/promote how can this be achieved for an online shop?

Question 2 - If article marketing is not carried out for SEO purposes then to what extent do you think about keywords? If it's only backlinks from relevant sites you are looking for then I'm guessing keywords is not an issue - this feels like it's missing the SEO side of things and surely we can kill two birds with one stone unless I'm missing something

Question 3 - would the article that's syndicated be pointing to the homepage or blog page through the signature, I'm assuming homepage?

Overall, I'm hoping someone can give me some advice around how article marketing strategy can be used in a way that also helps for SEO purposes to help it rank for specific keywords.

Apologies for the long winded post, but hope it's clear!

Thanks
Neil