Affordable Website Promotion

24 May

Submitting your articles or reviews to 400+ article directories has remarkable search engine benefits, but it does not always work as well as it should if you submit 400 identical articles. So how do we get round that?

Well, for a start, be very careful with this technique, do not over do it and do not use it on articles or reviews submitted to the very best article directories!

The first step is to rewrite your articles between article directory submissions. This is tremendous, but when you submit your new article to 30 websites in one go and 400+ sites in a second batch, then there is not the option to rewrite as you go.

For this reason I use MAS, which provides a thesaurus and makes suggestions as to what selected words could be changed to. Unfortunately, I have seen this techinque used to the extreme and even the titles of articles become totally unreadable, never mind the content of the piece. So be very careful when using this technique, read the output and check that it still makes sense. Go for correct English language articles rather than something that is totally changed, but absolute nonsense.

What tools for example MAS do is quite easy. Within your article you pick the words to change, or 'spin'. This is then coded up and you paste the 'spun' version of the article into the system that you are submitting via. This system then randomly picks one option from each spin and should, therefore, even with hundreds of reprints, always end up with unique articles or reviews.

You might do this manually, but it it far quicker and more time efficient to use a tool. Only check what it writes and post the original, not the spun version, to the best article sites!

Next, start blogging. If you do not already have a site on your web site, get one. Then post copies of articles or reviews, chunks of articles or reviews or whatever, to your own site. Sometimes I split articles or reviews down to post to my own websites and sometimes I join a couple together.

Why website though? There are two reasons. First, you are constantly adding new, fresh content to your site. Even though you have a static website, by blogging you have a constant flow of new content and search engines will see this and you get a huge boost. It is much better to have a fresh website than a stale one when you are fighting for search engine traffic.

Second, if people are searching for what you talk round in your articles or reviews, then if you have them published on your web site they might merely find your website and take an interest. Several make become subscribers to the weblog and eventually buyers.

Ultimately, you can also compile a collection of your posts into an ebook and either sell it to your visitors, offer it in return for signing up to a newsletter or give it away for some other reason.

Forget changing the code of your site, concentrate on what matters - get some articles written!

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19 May

Most of the authority as to what terms are significant to your site come not from what you say on your web site pages, but what other sites say about you. And this is by how they link to you.

Each link has what is often known as an anchor text - this is the piece of text that the visitor will click on to use the link. But the search engines take a look at this anchor and use it as a vote for the site. So, if the anchor text is "search engine ideas" then you have 1 vote for that term pointing to your website. Get enough votes and you will be top of the list.

Historically, website owners have done this by running link exchange sites on their web-sites. Mass exchanges, where you link to another site in return for them linking to you. This was fine, but as with the content issue, everything to optimse a website needs to shout out 'natural'. Search engines might straightforwardly spot huge directories and most have no page rank and are useless.

So, we need a way of link building that gives natural links, ideally from websites that we are not enforced to link to in order to keep the link back in place. And the remedy to this is article writing. I'll look at how and the other advantages later in the article.

So filling meta data and tags with keywords is old hat and link directories are out of the window because they have no value. But we need links and to do that we write articles. But, what is so good about article writing? Article writing undeniably does get sites to the top of search engine rankings, but that is only one part of the story.

For lots of web-sites, there is a market of potential customers that spread far and wide and some of these are researching more information by reading article directories. Others may be looking for offerings and services and will stumble onto articles on sites.

Either group, if interested in the article, could then see the author's biography at the base of the article and then visit the author's web site. With one recent brand new site, before it had even been cached by the search engines, I was able to get it up to 40 new unique visitors per day, only through people reading a small number of articles on 1 top article directory.

Also, given that a chief motivation for writing articles is the search engine benefit, the plusses go on. Not merely does the article get printed on the directory that you submit it to, but other directories and websites will pick up the article, print it and link back to you.

So, we write articles for 2 reasons. First they are wonderful with the search engines and boost our ranking position and second people will read them on the websites we submit them to and visit our web-sites. But how do we write them?

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10 May

Are you investing a load of time and effort writing articles? Do they work? Are they a waste of time? Have you ever measured what you get back from them? I have, and I can share with you my results.

With so many website owners putting a lot of effort into writing articles, what evidence is there that this technique actually does any good? Well, the aim is new targeted traffic arriving onto your website, and for this we can have direct traffic and search engine traffic.

Direct Traffic
Direct traffic will arrive in the form of people who have read our articles arriving onto our websites. Given the time and effort it takes to write an article (not that much, really), then a handful of visitors per article would be good. Even if you have to pay someone $10 to write each article, as long as the subject of the article is closely related to your website, they will be targeted visitors.

Looking at my most successful article of last month, in the 3 weeks since it was published, it has been viewed 376 times, producing 24 clicks over to my website. Those 24 targeted visitors would have cost a fortune through PPC systems, so I am quids in there. And that is just 1 reprint of the article, which has also be reprinted by some of those readers.

Search Engines
But what about the search engine benefits? Well, that article has only been around for 21 days, so it is too early to see any changes, but I also did a batch of articles 15 months ago on a new keyword phrase. That phrase was one that I had not worked on before and since then, I have left alone.

Before I worked on it, my sites were nowhere to be found on the terms. After a handful of articles I had reached 2nd and 3rd position on Google with 2 separate websites. And then I left them alone and didn't do any further work on the term.

Well, 15 months on and occasionally I still check the keyword phrase and a couple of related phrases. It has become a benchmark of mine - the websites still hover between 2nd and 4th places on the first page of Google, occasionally one will drop further down and then make a quick climb back to these positions.

So, for the sake of maybe a dozen articles submitted to a website that specialises in distributing them for SEO benefits, my two websites made it to a good search engine position and have remained there ever since. In fact, on one of the alternative names, I am now even in top position.

My experience is good
My experience of article writing is that with certain sources you can get a load of people reading your articles and then visiting your site and other sources can really improve your search engine rankings.

What more than that could you want? Article writing really does work!

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13 Apr

What is it about article writing that makes so many people do it? Why should we spend so much time writing articles and generating pages upon pages of text? If you want to know more, read on...

Article writing can be very rewarding in different ways and you can get a lot of different rewards out of it, from search engine traffic to the pride of getting your articles noticed. Many people are writing articles these days, from small 200 word how to articles to 500 or 600 more detailed articles. The fact is that any website business can benefit from publishing even just a few articles, so it is important to give it a go. This is why we do what we do.

Building content
First and foremost, articles build the content of our own website. We can publish them to our own blog areas or article sections and increase the number of pages on our own sites. This means that there is plenty of incoming new website content for the search engines to find, which keeps them interested in our websites. Also, buy increasing the amount of pages and text on our websites, there is more chance of having the keywords on our sites that people are looking for. This means more new visitors.

Therefore, write articles and publish them to your own website!

continue to part 2

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25 Mar

I am frequently talking to my customers and trying to persuade them to write a few articles. Many have not heard about it and need to know more information. Here are my top frequently asked questions.

If you are thinking about writing some articles, where are you going to start? There are many different ways to approach it and it seems frightening at first. But it can be scary! Hopefully these will answer some of your questions.

Why should I write articles?
When you submit an article you get the chance to include an author's biography. This can usually include one or two, sometimes three, links to websites of your choosing. These links not only help you in the search engines but readers of the articles will also click on the links and visit your sites.

Does it really work?
Yes! Just look at how your search engine results jump after you submit a few articles and how your website traffic will almost certainly increase. Your website statistics should also reveal visitors direct from other websites, which will be websites that have your articles hosted. This is what you want!

Can I write about anything?
Almost. Some directories will have a no adult policy and others will deal in just specific niches. You should also not write articles that just sing your own praises or could be read as news releases. This is not what article directories want and they are likely to reject these submissions.

What can I write about then?
Product reviews, how to articles, information about services and a whole host of other subjects can be written about. There is a whole wealth of what you can write about?

Do I have to write a lot?
The minimum word count per article will vary per article directory. Some only ask for 250 words whilst others can go as high as 500. Personally, I prefer to work to the higher end of that scale, even if it means more work. For a start, 250 words is not much by the time you have written an introduction and conclusion. These articles tend to appear very scant on information. Also, if a webpage does not have much content on it then it might not attract the attentions of the search engines, so I always work to at least 400 words.

Where do I submit them?
It is fairly well accepted that the premium site for submitting articles is EzineArticles.com. But they have earned this reputation through standards, so if your English is not up to scratch, you might struggle. There are plenty of other similar article sites as well as programs that will submit to hundreds of article sites for you. You can even get your articles submitted directly to people's blogs.

Can I submit the same article to 700 directories?
It is possible, but not recommended. If you are looking at a bulk submission tool, make sure that it allows you to spin the articles so that each gets a different version.

Article writing is a great and easy way of generating some free search engine traffic but can be very rewarding now. It should be just one part of your arsenal of affordable website promotion tricks and techniques.

Article by Keith Lunt.

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