Relevant, unique content is the key to obtaining and
retaining targeted traffic.
Dissecting that sentence:
Targeted traffic is the specific audience you are trying
to reach – usually your customers.
Unique content is content that no one else can provide.
Relevant content is content that has meaning to the
targeted traffic audience.
And if you have that relevant, unique content, your
customers will be happy and keep returning.
But good content is more than just relevant and unique; it is
rich in keywords. These are the Reeses Pieces that keep the
spiders happy; if you have lots of keywords placed
intelligently in your text, the search engine spiders
(cataloging programs that look for and list websites) will
rank your site higher than they would a similar site poorer in
keywords.
The importance of this cannot be underestimated. Most
customers reach a site for the first time by using a search
engine. They feed the engine search terms, and the engine
looks up and spits out the relevant websites – that is, the
ones that rank highest with those keyword search terms.
That's a hard task, but the harder one is this: if you don't
capture your customer's attention within about ten seconds,
they will click onto a different site. Yes, they will leave you.
Web surfers are fickle creatures; if you don't believe it, pay
attention to your own behavior when browsing the web.
But you can captivate them with excellent content, the sort
that captures their attention and gets them focused on your
site. Ideally, it should also sell to them whatever it is you
have to sell, while also keeping them interested and
informed. And the best way to have excellent content is to
provide informational articles.
In today's electronic world, every website may be its own
publisher, its own newsletter or magazine, its own
advertising agent. Every website may be in the business of
providing the information that has, until now, mostly been
delivered by commercial magazines.
More than just providing information, articles can give you
guru status. If your website's articles are well-written and
provide intelligent advice, your customers will know that you
are an expert in your field. Answering their main questions
ensures that they will come back with followup questions.
And you can even get interactive, with a FAQ where you can
provide the answers to questions posed.
Some people are confident enough in their own writing
ability to go ahead and write their own content articles. More
often, though, webmasters either don't have the time or the
skills to write articles to load online. This is where article
brokers like YourOwnArticles.com can come in handy.
An article broker sells all rights to articles to webmasters.
Say you run a website on how to care for anacondas. A good
article broker can find you keyword-optimized articles
written by a professional that will work perfectly on your
website. And you put your own name on the article.
Suddenly, you're the author of "Top Ten Reasons You Should
Never Feed Alligators to Anacondas." It's keyword optimized,
so that when web searchers type "anaconda" into a search
engine, it returns your article near the top. And it's wellwritten
and informative, so your viewers see you as an
expert and are more likely to bookmark and return to your
website than they would otherwise.
If you want to crank it up a notch, you can buy a whole
ebook, not just an article. Ebooks offered for free on your
website show your customers that you are not only an
expert, you know enough to write a book on the subject. If
you offer this informative ebook this is an impressive thing.
Better yet, included in the ebook is your URL, so that the
reader can click and open your website right up, enabling
them to access any new information on your site and not
incidentally supporting your site by viewing advertising,
purchasing things from affiliates, or purchasing items from
you.
Ebooks can generally be purchased from the same article
brokers you purchase articles from. They are simply
documents created in MS Word and saved to PDF via Adobe
Acrobat or OpenOffice (a freely downloadable program
compatible with MS Word). You can write your own if you
feel confident in your abilities, but most webmasters choose
to purchase them from professionals.
