Ready…Set…Go! If you are not submitting articles to article directory web sites, which pertain to your site’s content and theme, you are missing the proverbial boat on gaining additional popularity for your web site and valuable, one-way links back to your site which are critical for good placement within the search engines. Many formerly well-ranked, front-page sites have found themselves re indexed and tucked away on page 15 of google. Sound familiar? Who’s going to find you on page 15? Answer: No one. You may want to check some of your top 5 keywords on Google, Yahoo, and MSN to see where you are located. Different that what you expected? Is your site traffic down? Then, you’d better do something and do it quickly. Sites which refuse to write and publish content are “on their way out,” as one web designer and SEO expert has said. Let’s take a look at this issue a bit further.
In recent months, it has become absolutely critical for web site owners to submit content-rich articles for publication on major article directory sites, ezines and newsgroups. Gone are the days where it was relatively easy to get front page placement for your site for a few, or even several, key search words (“keywords”). Why the difference? Because the search engines are continually changing their search algorithms to provide more relevant search data to their consumers/customers. The “Big 2,” Google and Yahoo, compete fiercely to supply relevant and cutting-edge results for these searches in order to get people to come back for future searches. In review, the game goes a little like this: Let’s say Sally is taking her lunch break at work and wants to look up some information on shopping in Madrid. Sally fires up her browser, surfs to google and enters “shopping in Madrid” in the search box. On the date of this article, there were 19,600,000 results for this search phrase and only the top 10 are listed on page one. Even though less than thirty percent of people will click to page two, Sally decides she would like to copy-n-paste the first 20 results into an email to her home computer, so she can check the search results in detail when she gets off work. She creates the email and sends it off and does, in fact, research the top 20 results when she gets home.
Sounds like “shopping in Madrid” had 0.0001% of all available results indexed actually looked at by a google customer in this instance. Question: What if your web site has a major section devoted to downtown shopping in Madrid? Do you think, with your current level of web presence, that you have a chance of being on the first two pages of google? Would someone like Sally even know you existed? Chances are, she wouldn’t know your web site from a bale of hay! How would you like to *know* that the major portion of your site, which you have spent thousands of dollars developing, pertaining to “shopping in Madrid,” has a very good chance of getting high placement, maybe even front page, on google? While there is no way to “guarantee” this, it is important that you begin writing articles about “shopping in Madrid” and submitting them to the major article directories. Not a writer? Not a problem! Read On!
You’d be surprised that once you simply open up your notepad.exe file and begin typing, the ideas just seem to come forth. Type each of these ideas about what you would like to say on a separate line, pressing the enter key twice after each thought. Think of as many things as you can, regardless of how good or sorrowful they might be, and type them out, each on a single line. Tip: Think of what is already on your site and try to dovetail some of this content. Then (we’re almost there…), after you have more than a handful of ideas, go back and put an asterisk by the ideas you think would have the making of some decent content. Save this file as “Topics.txt” on your computer’s desktop and place the icon right smack-dab in the middle of your screen. Now, go get a diet coke or a cup of coffee and think about what you just did. Come back to you computer, open up the file that you just saved, choose one of the topics that you placed an asterisk beside, go to the next line and begin typing whatever comes to mind about that idea. Congratulations! You have just gotten over the hump of writing your first article! I have found that 90% of the “battle” is just selecting the topic. Obviously, you already know at least something about the topic you selected or you would not have written it down in the first place. Now, do a google or yahoo search on your selected topic and see what comes up in the search engines. I bet you see where I’m going with this…
Webmasters and site developers, you don’t have to be Truman Capote to write a 600 word article. Most people speak 600 words before they get out the door to go to work in the morning with a cup of coffee in-hand. Do you think you can put together 15 or 20 organized sentences on a topic that you are “supposed” to know a little bit about? I bet you can. Simply begin writing additional ideas below the topic you have selected and form them into a few paragraphs of organized thought that you think someone would be interested in reading. In the above example, “shopping in Madrid” I might see what the new happening place is to get good deals on Spanish antiques. Look up a few sites, select a shop, do a little research and then start writing.
The process of writing articles is really not that difficult once you get the hang of it. The above method is a very basic one that should work for many people. Also, please be sure to list the article on your own web site for additional new content which the search engines seem to really like. Once you have this information on your site, you may be surprised what could happen. Let’s say, the Spanish antique dealer which you wrote your article about might just contact you requesting a link or a banner ad be placed on your article page. How did they find your page? They did a search on google for “shopping in Madrid” and found your article listed and contacted you! Ah…success! While this probably won’t happen, you have the assurance that you are going through the right process to promote your web site and gain exposure in the search engines. There are many article directories to submit articles to. If set up properly, with one click of your mouse, you have the ability to create over 400 one-way back links to your web site. How long would this take you if you were doing the old reciprocal link campaign?
Go! You have invested countless hours and extraordinary effort to have a successful online business. It’s now up to you to keep it! By the way, the above article took less than one hour to write, revise, proof-read, and submit to over 400 article directories…and this writer ain’t no Truman Capote. Good luck!
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