Increase Website Traffic by Writing Articles

August 24, 2007

On my last post I talked about how you can obtain free content for you website. But who writes all that content and why? The answer is “you”. Other webmasters just like you are writing that content for distribution to help improve their own web site’s search rankings and to inexpensively (freely) advertise their product, service or opinion.  Learn how to use this promotion strategy yourself…

Here is how it works: You sign up for one of the many content distributors found online (I would recommend starting with EzineArticles and GoArticles ). Once signed up you want to write an article and submit it for distribution. This is free and if you follow their rules for layout and coding you have a very good chance of getting your article approved. Every distribution site has their own rules, but the main thing to look for are rules about outbound links within the content of the article and the use of other HTML tags. You will also usually have minimum and maximum word counts.

Ezine Article writing tips:
The purpose of writing this article is to promote your business or service or event etc. So that is most likely what you will focus on in your article. It is best to write in such a way as to “seem” like you are a unbiased 3rd party or else your article will come off too much like an ad (which it is). I’ve found one of the best methods is to write about a slightly larger topic than the topic you are trying to promote, and then slip in your site/product/service as a reference. For example if you are trying to sell a new organic “Skin Wrinkle Remover X”. You might want to write your article on the overall topic of “organic products in the the pharmaceutical industry”. You would then discuss how organic products are making a surge in the marketplace and that they provide new and healthier treatments for many common disorders. You will want to make sure that you cover “skin care” as one of these niches which you discuss and then make sure to include examples of some of the “most beneficial and proven” products…. It is here that you will mention your product and the website were it can be found. Now you’re providing information to your reader, and subtly getting them interested in your specific product and website.

Inbound Links from your article:
After you complete the article you will want to make sure you write a good byline. It is here that you can put direct links to your website using actual HTML url tags. This is how you improve your SEO rankings by increasing your incoming links. As your article is replicated on other sites, your byline will be another inbound link to your url and thus gains rankings. Make sure to use good keywords as anchor text and not to just write out your url. The search engines will give much more weight to a hot link whose text is meaningful as opposed to just an address. For example don’t write . http://www.thefitnessalmanac.com instead write Skin Care Experts .

Another point to keep in mind is to make sure that IF you are going to publish your article on your own website, make certain that the article page has been cached and indexed by Google PRIOR to submitting your article to the distribution sites. You want to make sure that Google knows that the article is yours before it finds copies of the same article out in cyberspace. If you don’t do this you run a risk that Google will deem your article as the duplicate content and not the original. You also can help to eliminate this risk by making sure that your byline contains a link directly to the original article on your website.

Benefits of writing free content articles:

1. Increase Inbound Links to your website
2. Increase rankings in the search engines
3. Increase exposure of your product, name, url, etc
4. It’s free advertising

Applications to speed up the process:
Writing articles for distribution can be very time consuming. Just the writing of the article itself can take a lot of work and research. Then when it’s time to distribute you must submit your article to dozens of websites. This also can take hours upon hours. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND making things easier on yourself with some quick start writing software and more importantly an automated submission program so that you can submit articles to 50 websites/hour as opposed to 5 per hour. It will make your life so much easier. After all time is money. Below are the two which I use. If you’re a good writer you might not want the article wizard but you will want the submitter pro. That I can guarantee.

• Article Submitter Pro - (automatically submits and tracks your article submissions to over 500 article distributor websites)
• Instant Article Wizard Pro - (uses mass searches of the web and a complex algorithm to do preliminary research for you in minutes, plus help to organize that information into a logical outline so that you can write a great article with less work or a mediocre article in only a few minutes)

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Web Promotion