Lets face it, if you own, run or maintain an internet based business these days, your site needs articles. Plain and simple, everyone who has a web site knows this. Even those who dont have sites but are frequent internet users know this as well. Why Because the internet is all about information. It is the information superhighway. And articles quench the thirst for information and knowledge that web browsers are searching for.
Its a win-win situation. Your articles provide great content for your web site, and they can produce many other marketing benefits for your site too.
The marketing benefits that having articles relating to your web site can provide are huge, compared to the work involved. If your articles are picked up by the major article distribution networks, they can be shown all over the internet, each one with your resource box under it with a link to your site. This essentially does 3 things for you:
1. It provides you link popularity. These links are highly targeted because they follow your article. Your article is obviously relevant to your site, and so it stands to reason that anyone reading the article is interested in that topic. If they follow your link to your web site, that is targeted traffic at its best. With more links pointing to your web site, your ranking in the search engines will improve.
2. They present you as an expert. By writing knowledgably about your subject, readers can easily see that you know your stuff. When they follow your link to your site, they already have a level of trust and confidence in you, which will help you to convert more sales and produce more profit.
3. Gets you noticed. Many articles are also beneficial to both company and its traffic. When your readers like the articles, they are more likely to tell their friends, family and peers about you, and recommend your web site to them, providing for a larger volume of traffic. You get bigger sales if your traffic trusts and believes in you prior to the seeing your site. Your product or services would be much easier to sell when they know that you know what you are doing and talking about.
So ok, we have established that articles are very important to your site and to your internet business. Articles are crucial and to keep ahead of the game, a site must have articles, it is imperative. There is one dilemma, though, not many people like writing articles.
Many website owners would rather spend their time on something else, and unless youre a big time company, you dont have the necessary resources to use on a pool of article writers. Plagiarism or copying of other articles is frowned upon and could easily get you into trouble, worst case scenario; a hefty fine and jail time.
So what are the other options
Well, for starters if you hate writing articles and you cant afford to hire people to write for you, then dont. Get free articles. The first place to look at for free articles is in the public domain. Here you wont have problems with copyright infringement and the potential penalties and fines if you get caught for plagiarism.
Public domain articles are articles freely given to the public for public use. You can do whatever you want with them. You can place them on your site, name them as yours, put them in a newsletter; its your decision. Always remember, though, that you will have to choose articles that are very relevant to your site content.
The downside to public domain articles is that since they are free for everybody to use, many of your competitors may have access to them as well. Since every site needs to be original and unique, even though you have the same niche, this could be a predicament. You may also have to edit them a bit to place more keywords and keyword phrases to make them better.
To find public domain articles, do searches on Google for public domain + your topic.
A recent trend has been to purchase private label articles. Writers and authors create the articles and offer them to web site owners with the rights to edit and amend them. If you can obtain private label rights to articles surrounding your subject, you can present them as your own and sign yourself as the author. Because these writers are selling them to multiple site owners, you can usually get private label articles cheaper than hiring someone to write them specifically for you. Again, the problem arises that your competitors may also have access to the same articles, so a recommendation would be to edit them significantly enough to make them uniqe.
Do a search on Google for private label + your topic.
Another way to get free articles is to allow other sites which have the same subject or topic as yours to submit articles to your site. This should be only to enhance your existing content or else all your articles would be leading to other sites, since these articles would have resource boxes with them that could link or direct the readers to the authors site. This method is ok to build up content for your site, but will not create the same viral effect that distributing your own uniqe articles can do. Thats why it is so important to have your own articles.
But, to truly feel the impact of what a good article to you, go for original ones. There are many article writers who do part time and freelance article writing jobs who charge only minimal fees. You can get good articles that have all the keywords and keyword phrases you need that people are browsing for.
The investment you made for these articles would be worthwhile because you could use them for all the benefits you could offer. You hold copyrights to them and you will be able to use them anyway you want. As your articles help you in building your business and your site, you will have more articles to write and maybe then you wont be having second thoughts about articles.
A great source for finding ghost-writers (authors who write anonymously) is www.elance.com. Post your project on there, explaing how many articles you want an for which topic, and writers from all over the world will bid for it. Prices can be fairly low, and in comparison to the amount of marketing and traffic you can get from them, it is definitely worth the investment.
Roger Mayne is the author of Mini Affiliate Sites, an ebook explaining how to set yourself apart from the army of other affiliates youre competing with. And the bonuses are worth an absolute fortune.
Since every website owner yearns for his site to be one among the top ranked sites by search engines, text links have gained much significance. Text links play a major role in Search Engine Optimization, since search engines rank websites and lists down its Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) depending upon the relevance of the text links pointing towards that particular site. It must be taken to notice that the high PageRanks of many sites are a result of text links and not any other SEO factor.
Usage of Text Links
The text link or the anchor text displayed must reflect the content and theme of the text link it anchors at. Text links can also help gain popularity to the site from which it is anchored. Thus it also implies on the fact that, linking with theme related SERPs, will be of a higher advantage for SEO. It has been found that when text is displayed as a link or rather as text links, the site gains a higher PageRank than when the text is displayed as body text itself. Thus adding a related link as a text link, in a site always boosts up the particular sites ranking and position in the SERP.
Needless to mention, the votes given to a site by a user on the basis of the relevance of the anchor text to the text link, make a difference during the ranking of a site. But search engines do not take every vote to consideration. They go a step further by examining whether the two sites that are linked through the text link are related in theme and content, and in turn whether the user qualifies to cast a vote for such a text link. Thus the search engine can come to a conclusion about the relevance of a users vote. More the relevance of a vote, more is the weight given to that text link.
There has been a wrong belief among the Webmaster forums lately that a domain will be banned if another site purchases a sponsored text link from that domain. This is no doubt, a misconception, since a website owner can never be held accountable for the sale of inbound text links. Due to high rates of link exchange and attempts to attain artificial link popularity through text links, search engines give a good deal of importance to the relevance factor. Thus, it is high time web site owners realize that buying links from completely irrelevant sites for the reason that they have a high page rank, does the site no good in the context of SEO.
Natural Text Link Usage
During text link building, one must always make sure that the keyword word density is distributed equally throughout the text. Integrating the non-keyword loaded anchor text link in the body of the text occasionally is an advanced technique used for search engine optimization, nowadays. The body of the text including the text links must not be over saturated with the keyword, as in such a case it would be quite obvious that the site is targeting at attaining a high PageRank. A tip for increasing the text link density would be by making one of 15 link requests made to a website, the domain of the very website that makes the request. It is also advisable to include quite a few text links in a sentence. Making the anchor text of the text link descriptive in natural language also helps. Getting text links to all pages rather than just the text links page is called Deep Linking and will be beneficial to the site. Having a good number of backward text links( i.e. simple static text links that point from one website to another), pointing toward a site can increase its link popularity dramatically.
Text link advertising has amazingly helped manage innumerable links and text link ads and is by far the best method a Webmaster can choose to boost his link popularity. Text link advertising is the latest and the most utilized method of promotion of websites.f
Sam Barns is the creator of the ultimate Link-exchange toolbox,which has Web Masters all over the world develop and maintain top search engine rankings => links-exchange.net