Posts Tagged ‘generating website traffic’
How Article Marketing can Generate Traffic to Your Website
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Publishing articles online about your website’s industry can prove to do wonders for improving your site’s rank on search engines, bringing in traffic and establishing yourself as an expert in your industry. And, the best part is, you don’t need to be a professional writer to do it. As long as your information is valuable, you use correct English and edit your work, you’ll start out being better qualified than 75% of online article writers! But, writing articles is one thing - getting them to work for your website is another. Here are some tips to getting your articles seen by as much of your target market as possible:
Make your articles reader and search engine friendly - With article marketing, the hope is to get your articles in front of as many people, by having it appear in the natural listings of search engines. Of course, you also want your articles to be reader friendly and highly informative so people are enticed to read it. Here are some basic guidelines for online articles:
* Write between 400 and 900 words per article - Too short of an article is just a blurb that is easily overlooked, and too long of an article is an intimidating epic that is sure to be a turn off to those unfamiliar with your pen name.
* Use hyperlinks - Try to use one to three hyperlinks within the body of each of your articles. Ideally, you should make the most important keywords hyperlinks and have them direct readers to a related section of your website. This serves to increase your website’s traffic and to improve its ranking on search engines for those keywords.
* Add a boilerplate - Take advantage of the area below your article to sell yourself (and your company too). Add your name, along with your e-mail address, website address and a one-line description of your company.
* Use original content - Search engines love new content and reward you by giving your site higher rankings. So, never copy the text from your website or from Wikipedia or any other source and paste it into your articles.
* Don’t sell - As tempting as it might be to talk about how great your business is in your articles - don’t. Your articles should give readers useful information, not a sales pitch.
* Publish your articles online - There’s no sense in writing an article just to have it sit on your computer - get it out there! Here are a few ways to get your articles off your computer and in front of potential customers:
* On your website - Add a "News" or "Resources" section to your website and start adding your articles regularly. The fresh content will help to increase your ranking in natural listings and bring in more traffic.
* In Article directories - There are countless websites that will publish your articles on the web - giving people, as well as other websites, access to your writings. Here are a few sites to get you started: Buzzle, Idea Marketers, Ebooks n Bytes, Article Central, EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com.
* On your blog - A blog is yet another place to post articles, though they can certainly be written in a more casual tone, and even a bit cheeky at times! To be effective, they should still follow the same rules for articles, as mentioned above. You may even consider writing a short post that relates to an article you’ve published elsewhere on your site, and then link to that article from the post for more information.
When you think of how effective articles can be in capturing your target audience’s attention and directing them to your website, it’s no wonder why more and more business owners are writing them!
Tags: article marketing, Carrie Hinkel, E-Commerce and E-Business, generating website traffic, Marketing Your Business, SEO
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Link Building Tips for Beginners
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
If you have a website, you’ll know that one of the most important aspects to improve your search engine rankings - and therefore increase your visitors and customers - is to have strong search engine optimization, or SEO. This will use keyword phrases and specialist marketing techniques to get your site higher up the search engine rankings. However, there’s another highly effective method, and it’s just as important - link building.
What is Link Building?
Just as the name suggests, link building allows you to build quality links into your website from other websites. This raises your profile because links show that people are visiting your site often - and the more visitors a site has, the higher up the search engine rankings it will go.
This is because Google and the other search engines believe that the more quality links a site has coming into it, the more useful the content of that site must be, so it places you higher up the rankings to encourage people to visit you. However, you can’t just use any links - indeed, if you have too many worthless links, you might end up being penalized by Google if they feel you’re trying to beat the system. So how do you link build and stay on the right side of the major search engines?
Some of the best ways to increase the amount of quality links to your website include:
- Request links from websites that complement your service or product. If you sell educational tools, ask universities and online colleges to link to you.
- Register your site with directories for incoming links.
- Offer reciprocal links. For each company that links to you, you’ll do the same for their company website.
- Write articles to put on your website, either as latest news or as expert tips, and submit them to article directories like Ezine.com or Quality Content. Not only is fresh, quality content great linkbait, you can create incoming links yourself by submitting your content to article sites. One thing to watch out for, however: If you want an article on your site to rank well, submitting it to article sites that have a higher Google PageRank (PR) than your site may hinder those efforts - the article site may rank higher for your article than your own site!
- Use press releases. These are becoming increasingly effective and important at driving traffic to your site - if you have a news story to tell, write a press release with a link back to your website, and then have it published on one of the numerous press release sites online, like Press Release PR or PRWeb.
- Buying links. While this strategy has come under fire in recent months and has even resulted in Google penalizing websites that buy and sell links for SEO (what has been known as the infamous “Google PR Smackdown”), you can still buy a few links here and there. Just don’t buy a lot at one time, and make sure the site where you’re buying a link is highly relevant to your site. Also, if you’re going to buy a link, make sure it’s on a page that has a Google PageRank (PR) of 5 or higher.
These are just some of the ways you can increase the links into your website. If you want, you can also ask friends and colleagues to link to you, if they have a blog or website of their own. As long as the website linking to you has some value, and isn’t regarded as a porn or gambling site, then you’ll soon see your ranking increase on the all-important major search engines.
Tags: boosting traffic, danny brown, E-Commerce and E-Business, generating website traffic, incresing website traffic, link building tips, Marketing
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