Our legal video section is proving as popular as our legal article one. I spent a good few hours watching legal videos today - the quality is really high, which is great news for our visitors.

Here are a few I liked:-

You Deserve a tax holiday You deserve a TAX HOLIDAY and an end to assessment of federal income taxes. The immediate effect of this Tax Holiday will be to leave more money in your pocket. You’ll take more money home with every paycheck.

Who screens the screeners Its a good question.

Texas Workers Compensation Lawyers Texas Worker’s Compensation entitles you to workers comp medical and income benefits if you have been injured on your job.

Lemon Law All about the law surrounding lemons, not the fruit variety!

An Introduction to the Patent System This one is really interesting showing jurors about patent law.

Its surprising just how many law firms are using youtube to promote their firms, but with sites like Article Alley using more and more of this type of content you can see why.

Yesterday saw article 950,000 go live on Article Alley, we don’t list all the articles that get submitted, and currently only about 55% get approved. But nevertheless thats a lot of articles and a lot of work by our authors.

We expect that the 1,000,000th Article will be live this month.  We are still thinking of something special to mark that event.  More about that soon.

urlfan as the name suggests analyses urls - it shows the popularity of a blog out of all the blogs it tracks, at the moment some 3,783,554.  Article Alley is currently the 2,672 nd most popular.

As the graph indicates, we are getting more mentions this year than at any time since our launch in 2004.  Article Alley is getting more popular in the blogosphere.  Rising mentions means more traffic and more exposure for our authors work.

If you have a blog, then mention us, and link to your articles on Article Alley, its a great way of helping us, which also helps you at the same time.  What we like about urlfan is that you can drill into the results and read the blog posts that it monitors. 

Its a great tool and whilst not covering the entire blogosphere does have a representative sample. Its statistically significant if I remember my school statistics!  There are so many great tools around on the internet its now easier than ever to track you own performance and keep an eye on your competitors.

Article Alley can be found on urlfan here

Our Google ad planner is now up to date, its a great place tom check the approx amount of page views and traffic that a website gets.  our new website will allow a lot more advertising opportunities.

Ad Planner Description

ArticleAlley is a leading article directory that allows authors to publish articles for free. Webmasters can use content on their own website or blog. Covers a wide range of subjects allowing for highly targeted advertising.

Our Article Alley Google Ad Planner

I blogged about the seo contest that is currently running for the phrase Sulumits Retsambew articlealley is currently #51 on google.com which is pretty good going considering the only work done consists of a single post in our blog and now this follow up one.

our site performs well for thousands of phrases, and authors are always welcome to sign up and submit their own articles for free - you can quickly get 1,000’s of visitors and with them a lot of great exposure for your site.

Enjoy the contest!

As part of our new site roll out we will be tightening up on the quality of articles that we show live on our site,  duplicates have crept in and whilst these are not huge in number we are taking action to cleanse these from our database.

Also we will be looking more closely for broken links in existing articles, so if you have any old ones that point to old pages or expired domains, then now is the time to login and edit them.

Our site guidelines can be found here.

We plan to push Article Alley up a notch to take us back to being a top tier directory.  Keep popping back as our new site will be live very soon.

We have now added nearly 300,000 videos to Article Alley since January!  Its taken a long time to review all of these, and some more review work is still going on.

Food and drink has long been a popular article section, and is also providing popular for videos.

Here are a few videos I have enjoyed watching:-

Pairing wine with food Today wine and food people know that two principles can help in matching wine with food: the complimentary principle and the contrast principle.

Shrimp Cocktail and wine Heather Johnston demonstrates how to make shrimp cocktail, based on a recipe by Jacques Pepin and Julia Child.

How to make homemade wine Use natural corks for organic wine making at home; learn to cork homemade fruit wines in this free wine making video.

Wine Trails of France Region Loire/Cognac Drawing on vignerons and winemakers in appellations throughout France we present an intimate look at current wine styles.

Types of wine glasses Tips for selecting the proper wine glass for different types of wine.

Wine Library Dolcetto wines from the Piedmont Region of Italy offer straight up tradition to intense “Big Boy” wines.

Wine Types & Selection Red wine headaches can be avoided by paying attention to the amount…

As you might guess I enjoy a glass or two of wine!

A lot of articles are getting rejecting at the moment due to issues with authors articles.  We are rejecting articles due to spelling errors, broken links and articles being too short.

Our editorial process involves a check of all links and a check of the document, but we don’t correct errors found, just approve or reject.

If you can then please check carefully that your links all work.

Alexa the popular search engine and web statistics site continues to show us making good progress throughout June 2009. Alexa is great to compare your website to others, its absolute traffic levels are

not that accurate, because without access to your website logs its not possible to know.

What Alexa does is use the experience of several million users of its toolbar, that way it can track the pattern of these users and extrapolate that out to the complete internet, the flaw with this approach is that it magnifies the user who use Alexa, which are more SEO folk etc.

All the same its pleasing to see our traffic steadily rising. You have to be careful not to get addicted to sites like these! Otherwise you can spend all your time looking for evidence of the progress of your online marketing strategy, rather than actually getting on with it!

As long as you check Alexa just from time to time its fine, or use it to check out your competition, remember its easy to fake high Alexa traffic levels, but why would you manipulate the appearance of low traffic levels?

A lot of web users slate Alexa, but I think its fine and also a bit of fun at the same time.

Sulumits Retsambew is webmaster stimulus spelt backwards and is a competition that a friend of mind has entered. This blog is normally pretty strong on Google so I have posted here to see how we compare to the SEO bods in the contest. Its a bit of fun for the office staff as we have no interest in competitions Sulumits Retsambew or otherwise!