So you were browsing the Internet and stumbled across this
amazing thing – a huge database filled with articles, many of
them about your very specialty, and all of them free to use!
And now you want to know why on earth you should ever
pay for anyone to write articles for you; after all, you have
access to all the free articles you want.
There's a principle you should remember here: nothing is
ever, truly, free. Even when you give away things for free on
your website, it's with the hope of generating a sale from it.
Article directories are no different.
Finding Article Directories
There are several major article directories online, including
the following:
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.marketing-seek.com.
It's a great idea to contribute articles to them. In general,
however, it's a bad idea to use articles they want to give
you.
Every article in these directories is a viral marketing
scheme. The idea is that you'll download their article and
place it, for free, on your website. But with each of these
articles, you also have to download what's called a resource
box. This is a graphic box with the name of the author, his
or her URL as a clickable link, and sometimes a bio. You are
barred from deleting this resource box if you're using the
article for free.
Here's what happens: you have a website you've carefully
developed to display your expertise. All over the website,
you've used your knowledge, tastes, and personality to bring
your customers what they want. But now you place an
article with someone else's name on it, and a handy
clickable link. Aha! says the customer. Another expert! And,
because Internet audiences are notoriously fickle, he or she
clicks on the link, taking them away from your website and
into the website belonging to the article author.
The article has done exactly what it was intended to do –
bring someone else more business. And you may lose more
than the customer's momentary attention. If the writer of
the article has a website that competes directly with yours,
then you may have lost that customer entirely.
How To Use These Articles
There may be times, however, when you feel you really
must use an article from an article directory. There is a right
way and a wrong way to do this.
First, never violate the terms of the agreement of the article
directory – in other words, don't remove the resource box
from the article and try to pass it off as your own, and don't
tamper with the link in the box in any way. It's ethically
wrong, and besides, in small niche markets people talk more
than you might realize; if the author catches what you've
done (surprisingly easy to do) and starts talking about it on
bulletin boards and egroups, you could find your reputation
ruined very quickly.
Second, use articles from an article directory sparingly and
with great care for what they say. Ideally, only articles that
contain information or news of major importance should be
used on your website. Articles by recognized experts in the
field are also fine, though, particularly if you know that most
of your customers know who this person is.
You can also use articles from an article directory if you have
an affiliate link with the person who has written the article
anyway. You get the free article from someone who's
sending you traffic, and if you let them know you're running
their article, they'll be flattered and might return the favor.
Look around in the article directory's terms of use. You may
find that the directory allows you to purchase the right to
use articles without the resource box. If you have this
option, you should take advantage of it.
Using Article Directories Yourself
A better use for article directories is to upload your own
articles and allow people to download them on the same
terms as the other authors. It’s viral marketing: you're
giving away something and allowing other people to spread
the virus – your information and the fact you are an expert –
using their own resources. Next to active word-of-mouth
advertising, viral marketing of this sort may be one of the
best tools you'll ever find to publicize your business.
Why Use Keywords and Keyword Phrases?
Keywords are something of a venerable institution on the
web. Long ago, when AOL was one of the lone pioneers
(along with Compuserve – remember them?), they
catalogued websites by using keywords. At first, you told
AOL what you wanted your keyword to be; later, they sold
keywords to you. That keyword, whether it was roses or
dogs or computer software, was the most important search
method on the Internet.
Then Alta Vista, the web's first search engine, came along. It
catalogued pages by the phrases it found in the metatags in
the header of the web page. (Metatags are places you can
put keywords and descriptive phrases and not have them
show up on the web page itself.) This worked pretty well for
a while
Then people found out you could abuse the metatags.
Webmasters who ran adult sites would simply look for the
most popular search terms online and put them in the
metatags. No matter that dolphin, cooking equipment, and
running shoes had little or nothing to do with the content on
their pages – they'd use them simply because it caused their
rankings in search engines to go up.
This was the birth of keywords as we know them.
Keywords and Keyword Phrases
Keywords and keyword phrases are words and/or phrases
the search engines look for when they catalog your site.
Search engines only work if they can return relevant content
to the people who are using them to search, so it's very
much in their interest to find articles that go well with the
search terms people insert in the search box.
Search engines look for keywords in several places:
In the metatags at the beginning of a web page
Within the header tags of a web page
In the body of text on a web page, especially in the
first paragraph and the last paragraph
If your page is about cooking, for instance, you want to look
for keywords like cooking, recipes, utensils, ingredients, etc.
to trigger the search engines to properly catalog the web
page. And you want to put in enough keywords that the
search engine will understand that this is an important page
on that topic, not just mentioning the keyword; yet not so
many keywords that your content is unreadable for the
people who browse to it. Most keyword article writers think
between 3% and 7% of your words being keywords or
keyword phrases is optimal.
But what if you've put these keywords in your site, only to
find that your site is not ranking high at all with the
keywords you want? There are several other variables that
can affect search engines (though the exact recipe they use
to determine where your page falls is a closely-guarded
secret, and it changes periodically anyway).
How Search Engines Work
Search engines use a text-based algorithm to determine
where your site falls in their rankings, part of which depends
on the keywords you use, where in your document you use
them, and how they're used. But they look at keywords in
another place as well: the links that connect to your site.
If you've participated in link exchanges with other
webmasters or if you've donated articles to article
directories, search engines will observe and record these
links. If your main keyword is not in these links, you've
wasted your time developing the links and the content. But
if your keyword is included in the links in some way, it will
strengthen your website's relationship with that keyword.
This is one of the most powerful search engine tools you
have. Use it.
In addition, search engines check to see if you've updated
your content recently, and whether the content you're
providing is very similar or the same as content on another
page. Frequent updates will raise your search engine
ranking. Content that looks like another site, whether you've
been plagiarized or not, can lower your ranking or eliminate
it entirely.
And that's really about all there is to it.
One More Thing
When you optimize your site for the search engines, be
certain you retain its ease of use for humans, too. That's
who it's written for. And a number 1 rated site, no matter
how content-rich or how hard you've worked to improve its
ranking, is absolutely worthless if your viewers look at it and
then click away.
