|
Articles and How to Use them to Bring Traffic to Your Web Site
Articles represent a vast wealth of marketing opportunities and in my opinion the very best way to make money online.
This is because:
* Writing articles establishes you as an expert and increases credibility for you and your business. What an editor chooses to print about you is invariably more believable than anything you say about you and your business!
* There are web marketers whose entire working day is spent around writing and uploading articles to their own sites and into article directories solely to achieve a higher ranking in search engine listings. This applies whether the individual has a site selling their own specific products and services, such as consumer goods, insurance, collectibles; or if they are promoting affiliate products or generating advertising revenue from such as Google AdSense and other major pay-per-click promoters.
* Writing and publishing articles across the Internet help your site or site rank high in search engine listings. Just one article can spread across the Internet like wildfire, creating new active links each day, until finally you have hundreds of active links to your site from just one article in one article directory. Imagine how many more active links might result from having dozens of articles posted in hundreds of directories.
The highest ranking sites tend to:
- Be rich in content bearing relevance to words and phrases keyed into search engines. So, generally speaking, sites containing several occurrences of specific key words and phrases will rank higher than web sites devoid of those words. Articles that are rich in key words and phrases people actually used to find information online can lift your site way up in the search engine rankings.
The more keyword rich articles you have on your site, the higher your site is likely to rank in search engine listings. So you will find sites ranking high in search engine returns purely because they contain lots of articles each designed around specific key words and phrases used by the site's target audience.
So a site specialising in green tea will research key words and phrases most often keyed into search engines by people wanting to buy or learn more about green tea. The most successful article marketers will create as many articles as possible containing those key words and phrases.
Those key words will appear in article titles, in the opening paragraph for the article (most search engines focus on key words and phrases featured high on a web page), in domain and sub-domain names, in metatags, page titles, picture titles, and other suitably discrete locations. Discretion is essential and key words and phrases must have a justifiable purpose in the article and on the site as opposed to existing purely in hope of attracting search engines.
- Contain a high and growing number of active incoming links from other web sites. Incoming links are like recommendations for your product, and the more your web site url is splashed across the Internet, the more important your site will seem to be. 'Seem to be' because search engines and their human editors can tell if sites are superficially 'Search Engine Optimised'. There are hundreds of directories across the Internet where your articles can be published and accessed free for others to add to their web sites, as long as your business details, typically your email or web site address, is linked. An active link is one hyperlinked to direct readers to your site, you'll normally see it underlined and often coloured blue. A dead link is just text, not actively hyperlinked to its source.
Incoming only links are better than mutual links, namely where you link to an outside site and that same outside site links to you. The end result is that links cancel each other out. You need to focus on increasing incoming links over outgoing links and that is often done by writing and uploading articles for publishers to add to their sites.
Here's a great way to exchange links in a way that doesn't diminish your incoming score. You accept links from other firms onto the page you wish to rank high on incoming links but you don't give return links from this particular site. Instead you have a site set aside purely for outgoing links. Make sure your link exchange partners realise what you are doing and you'll accomplish all parties' aims and obligations.
* Every time your article is published by someone else, with active links back to your site, the more incoming links you will achieve and the higher your site will rank on most major search engines. Surprisingly, it does not take hundreds or thousands of incoming links to achieve a high ranking.
Check this out at www.alexa.com. Alexa ranks sites according to popularity with users and consequently with search engines. The lower a site's traffic ranking number allocated by Alexa, the more hits that site generally achieves as measured daily, weekly, quarterly. So firms like Google, eBay, MSN rank in single numbers, unlike most poorly promoted commercial sites which might rank in six or seven figures numbers or may not rank at all on Alexa.
But check those high ranking sites and you'll find most have triple, quadruple, or even higher numbers of incoming links.
These are examples I spotted today.
- www.bytestart.co.uk - specialising in business information, ranks 57,273 on Alexa and has just 114 incoming links.
- www.fsb.org.uk - Federation of Small Business - ranks 77425 and has 724 incoming links.
- www.friendster.com - online friendship/dating site - ranks 56 and has 3311 incoming links.
As you can see, generally the more incoming links, the better the site ranks on major search engines.
How to get those 3311 links such as belonging to Friendster?
You can buy them, advertise for them, or write and upload articles that ultimately generate hundreds and thousands of links to your site. It isn't at all unusual for just one article to generate thousands of incoming links. For example, one of my articles, 'Keyword Density And How To Use It To Keep Traffic Flowing To Your Site!' took me about an hour to write, half an hour to upload and is currently listed on 273 sites. Check it out for yourself, go to www.google.com, key the title into the search box with + between individual words, press to find and that number should be even bigger by now.
|
|
