Our progress since mid January has been really good - I normally post updates to our Alexa rank at the end of each month, but this last week has been so promising that I couldn’t resists updating.  Historically Article Alley peaked at around this level in mid 2007, but its taken until now to recover the ground.

What encourages us is that this progress has been made without the new content that we have ready to add being live. Anyway nobody can know what the future will bring but for now we are looking up at the stars.

Our video section has started to go live today - its the result of a couple of months of development and planning - at the moment it is stand alone but soon users will be able to upload their own videos and related videos will be displayed from within relevent articles.

Most videos come from youtube at the moment but these will soon be joined by other sources to give the most related possible video complement to our articles.

Topics covered by the legal section are wide and varied, but cover amongst other accident claims, no win no fee and personal injury topics, plus divorce and many other areas.

Check out legal videos on Article Alley

Our video feature is due to go live tommorrow - we will gradually roll out the new feature during the rest of February and March - we have nearly 500,000 video pages to add - so it will be quite a change for Article Alley by the end of the roll out we will have a related video for approx 60% of our articles.  Not to mention the load on the server array caused by indexing the cross relationship between 750,000 articles and 500,000 videos!

Its early days for us at the moment and we are working on improving the quality of the relationship between articles and videos - please bear with us if some unpredicted matchs pop up.

To get an idea of what to expect check out videos on article alley

There is still a lot of work for us to do in developing this area, but for us its a real step forward.

This last week has been officially our busiest ever week for article submissions - in the seven days to 16th February we had 22,100 new submissions - our average is normally around 15,000 so thats a real surge of activity. Monday is always our best day and yesterday alone we had 4,326 so that is some going by our authors. Active or what!

We are very pleased with the level of interest and whilst it has created another small backlog we are confident of clearing this within the next few days.

Thanks and keep them coming - Article Alley is on the up!

We have been actively tweating over the last month or so and are please to see that our number of followers on twitter is starting to move in the right direction.

We have already made some friends via Twitter which makes it worthwhile alone, but better still we have been picking up new authors who are discovering the benefits of Article Alley having arrived via our twitter profile.

Twitter is growing at a huge rate and is rapidly becoming the place to social network. We have some catching up to do - but we are on it now!

We have gone from zero followers at Xmas to 180 now which is a very good start, our custom design has made our twitter profile much more attractive, we are also pleased to hear of new ideas and suggestions coming from our twitter followers - it really is the cutting edge of things - its exciting being part of it.

We have always pinged weblogs with every new article posted since day one back in 2004, but from today the list has been expanded to include Yahoo, Syndic8, Ask and 5 others.

This brings your new content even quicker to the attention of the leading search engines.

Progress with our new features is progressing ahead of schedule and traffic has increased nicely as a result.

Articles are now starting to appear on Article Alley with their new tag pages for example the following article on unsecured personal loans now links to tags about topics such as.

Tags: poor credit history, debt consolidation, bad credit loans, bad credit loan, holiday package, maximum rate, repayment period, bad credit car loans, sub prime loans, unsecured personal loan, secured loans, unsecured personal loans, unsecured bad credit loans, loans with bad credit, unsecured bad credit loan, bad creditors, home loans with bad credit, credit interest, loan unsecured bad credit, collateral benefits

To keep load levels to manageable levels we are phasing in these tag pages. But they should all be fully active by March.

Our next new feature has gone live today - every article in our database now has category tags. We will be rolling this feature out over the next weeks / month or so - it requires a complete rebuild of the cache - so to keep load levels down we will phase in the tags - id at a time.

Here is an example of Article Alley Tags

Tags are a great way to find related content as they contain links to other articles using the exact phrase that visitors are looking for. Thus relevent and related content is organised together in a logic easy to read and follow format.

We will keep you updated on progress.

january is showing very pleasing progress according to Quantcast the popular web democraphics website.

See articlealley on quantcast for more details our rank is now 7,155 which is great progress for us. Quantcast is great for learning about the profile of visitors.

With valentines day around the corner we are seeing a surge of romantic articles. Article Alley has 1,000’s of pages of romance related content - here are a small selection of recent ones.  Keep them coming!  Our editoral team loves them!

A Man’s Guide for a Perfect Valentine’s date

Valentine’s Day Budget Gift Shopping

History and Romantic Ideas for Valentines day

Valentine’s Day - Don’t Mess It Up

There is still time to submit them but don’t forget it takes a day or so for our editorial team to approve them and at least another day for Google to crawl and index.

Remember to use them on your dating/romance sites and to boomark them.