The articles would be about the purpose served by the web app and the industry.I'd be inclined to keep the content except that few would see the articles due to the low rank of the sites

Free apps? Apps for sale? Apps to promote other aspects of what you do or are offering? In the early days of SEO, pre blogs, etc, free web apps were in fact often recommended as one form of link bait. Apps can also be useful tools that you are selling. I'm assuming in this case, you're asking about the latter.

In the past, when the web was smaller (and depending on the target audience), written content of some kind was the necessary promotional method, and you hoped also that you would be found by search. Truly useful, excellent content is still a viable form of promotion, but you need to call attention to it. Now, "social" and "viral" methods are often used as well.

I'd be inclined to keep the content except that few would see the articles due to the low rank of the sites

I think the trick now is also to get others to talk about your app to get people to your site and to link to it. When the buzz about the app is sufficient, people looking for such a tool will find it by search, assuming you can predict the likely search terms well enough to target your articles.

In the case of apps, "free" is a possibly helpful viral tool. Perhaps a limited free version of your app might attract some attention.

There are now a huge number of web channels available, which make it both easier and harder... but "marketing" in the old fashioned sense now enters into it, using tools of the web as well as non-web media. Many web marketing tools are commonly called "social" media... some also involve search, or work together with search. Think about video, blogs, twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc etc etc. With all of these, there's a constant chicken and egg situation, and you've got to figure out a way in to start attracting significant attention.

Creativity in how you use these channels can become as important, if not more important, than site content itself... in much the same way as a TV commercial might once have been key to the success of a product, or a creative poster might once have been key to the success of a movie. With more channels competing for attention now, you have to be very clever in how you reach your target audience. In mass marketing, you may be forced to be clever in a great many areas.

This discussion, while now dated, contains a lot of food for thought, and it may start you thinking outside of just the written word...

Mostly Viral Top Traffic Alternatives to Search Engines
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/906.htm
[webmasterworld.com...]

Thanks for the response,

However, by web application, i am actually referring to a web services application.

...by web application, i am actually referring to a web services application.[

It wasn't quite clear. I tried to make the post broad enough to cover a lot of possibilities.

Essentially, though, we're in an environment now where we need to promote our promotion, so to speak, in order for it to reach a critical mass, where the promotion network, whatever it is, starts growing by itself.

With text content, that means having it good enough, and getting it mentioned enough, that it receives some attention and then attracts links on its own.

If you use twitter (and, because of time limitations, I'm not a big user, but your audience might be), then you want to get to the point where comments about your app are tweeted and then retweeted. If you look at the shape of an inbound link graph, the tweeting/retweeting network (or any social network) resemble a map of an inbound link graph (in reverse)... many branches going out, then hopefully getting funneled back into your material.

The trick is breaking through somewhere into a wide enough awareness that the network grows.