We often get asked how to get good rankings, and its easy to give an easy answer - such as put in lots of hard work and you will get somewhere. We have been active in website promotion since 2004 and have learnt a lot over the years.

Article Promotion
Article promotion must of course be a central part of any serious internet promotional strategy, the benefit of article promotion are:-

* Its free!
* Quality content is always sort on the internet
* Its a proven strategy
* You can you use the content you write on your own website
* If articles are free to use, you can use other authors content to expand the usefulness of your website.
* If you are not a good writer then use a services such as our own professional article writing service

There are other complimenary approaches that should be pursued.

Directory listings
Web directories have been around for a long time, but the quality of them varies a lot, 99% are not worth the time to submit or the $ costs involved. There are a few that are worthwhile, and even for a time appear to have been part of Google’s algorithm. We certainly recommend listing in these if your budget will allow and you are serious about the promotion of your website.

Dmoz or Open Directory
This powers around 250 web directories including Googles own Directory, its free to list, but sadly its editors are very slow and unresponsive to respond to submissions, its certainly worth persisting but you should allow 12 months or more to get listed.

Yahoo Directory
This is a strong directory, listing here appears to confirm a little extra creditibilty onto your site, certainly in the eyes of Google and Yahoo at least, the $299 annual fee ensures that only serious sites are included and this combination of price and human quality review means that it is a good indicator of a trustworthy site. There is not a significant benefit in a listing, but its of some value, depending on your sites own potential to generate returns its worth a look.

Onsite factors
The search engines are principle a relevancy engine sorting pages by the text they contain and the quality of links they have from elsewhere on your website and externally around the web. To get good search results, your pages must contain pages “about” the phrases you are targetting and links from related sites.

A site about Article marketing - with text about this phrase on its pages and from links on other related websites will appear above one with just text and no links. Its important therefore to write good quality content and then encourage quality sites to link to you.

We have been experimenting with a wiki for ArticleAlley for sometime now and have finally decided to take the plunge and make it live now. Our idea is to link articles together in much the same way that wikipedia does.

The principle idea is to make information more easily accessible to visitors, some of our older content is paginated 100’s of links away from our home page, and non-unsurprisingly these pages get very few visitors now.

We did trial using mediawiki itself but the level of spam posting was difficult to handle so we decided to implement our own solution. We are not sure how this trial will develop, but the concept seems sound as it makes ArticleAlley more useable for visitors, we will report back in 2009 and update you all on progress.

We are starting with a few categories but in time all our content will be indexed in this way, and we shall probably drop the sitemap style pages we have as these are intensive on the server to generate and don’t seem to assist promotion in any meaningful way.

Quantcast are a leading internet profiling service. Quantcast Corporation was founded in 2005 by a team of engineers and mathematicians committed to advancing the digital media industry. The Quantcast team has conducted extensive research and development to provide publishers with a free and easy way to report on the audience metrics that advertisers demand, including traffic, demographics and lifestyle assessments.

Their latest report shows that the typical visitor profile, of ArticleAlley’s loyal user base, are more likely to be:-

Female,
Aged 18-34
and have children

Based on the feedback we receive and our database of articles, this data would seem to be correct.

Their service is free of charge and can be found here

Chitika Premium ads have been in place on Article Alley for about six months now, they are not big earners but generate complimentary income, without detracting from Google Adsense or Kontera income. They are mostly aimed at USA/Canadian traffic but with some European presence as well.

Getting complimentary income is an important strategy in these testing times, and Chitika can help.

A good feature of Chitika is that they can be run alongside Google Adsense without TOS issues, the ads are clearly different from Google ones and are therefore acceptable.

We recommend Chitika

In October we added a questions and answers features, we were getting around 30 questions a day from browsers who clearly believed that the articles on ArticleAlley we all our own and wanted answers that only the authors or others familar with each topic could answer.

As Google answers has dropped out of this market we thought would be good to get in, and the service provided by Yedda does just that.

It helps everyone.

Questions get answers.
Articles get links and traffic from Yedda partner sites looking for information on a topic
Authors get more exposure.

So far the feedback is good - we plan to extend the use of Yedda across our network during 2009

Traffic continues to advance at a stready pace, more visitors means more exposure for your articles, since our server performance issues were resolved in June 2008, progress has been good.

We have using Kontera since the summer and we are please with the results, Kontera offer intext link advertising, these links are introduced through Java code so don’t cause any problems with search engines, or count as backlinks.

ArticleAlley is a very rich site in terms of content and 95% of visitors find our pages via search results for phrases within articles themselves as opposed to looking for article sites.  The ads therefore are a useful resource for visitors showing them products very closely related to their search requests.

Kontera provides:

• Increased Incremental Revenue – We were particularly sceptical on this point, but it seems that intext links have little impact on other advertising media on ArticleAlley such as Banners or Google Adsense.     
• High Click-Through Rates (CTR) – Kontera’s CTR rate seems good compared to other providers we have tried.
• Positive User Experiences - Feedback is generally positive.
• Content Monetization –Kontera’s ContentLink ads can be served on every type of website including news sites, forums, blogs, and social networking sites. Kontera’s dynamic contextual analysis lets you serve ContentLinks as soon as new and relevant content is posted.  
• Publisher Control & Customization –Features allow for control of the advert density and colors  
• Online Publisher Center – Kontera’s provides some contol feature.

Sign up to Kontera here

ArticleAlley is currently undergoing a revamp at the moment, and as part of this we have added this blog, we will post regularly on issues affecting our authors, frequently asked questions and features under development.

ArticleAlley has grown hugely since we went live in early 2005, on a typical day we can get close to 2,000 article posts, we have a full time in house team of four now, we alternate between, editing, authoring and promoting the site.

We have many new features going live in the new year.

For now Welcome to this Blog!

Adrian
Webmaster