Maximize Your Search Engine Traffic With Great Articles
By: Cody Moya | Posted: 25th March 2006
Article content is crucial to drawing your audience, particularly with those niche markets hungry for specialized information. Just as critical as content, however, is making certain your articles are search engine optimized (SEO).
Search engines have a decade and a half of increasingly sophisticated technology behind the way they find and rank web pages. In the very earliest days of the text-based web, there were few enough pages that ranking wasn't really important, and the search engines in use at that time – Archie, Veronica, Jughead – indexed only websites that were submitted directly to them. When HTML was invented and the first web browser using this rich and easy-to-use language came about, the number of web pages online began to increase exponentially.
Soon, it was necessary to have a search engine like Lycos, which went out and looked for websites by itself. Search engine technology grew rapidly, overcoming wave after wave of attempt to take advantage of them through various schemes. Today's search engines use sophisticated text-based algorithms that look at a variety of things on and off your web page to determine where to rank it in relevance when someone searches for specific terms.
How Search Engines Work Now
Every search engine works a little differently, but they all search for keywords, metaterms, and links to your site. Keywords are terms that are used frequently in the text of your document, and generally correlate directly with the words someone searches for. For instance, if you search for "dogs," the keyword your search engine relates to that is "dogs." Some search engines are smart enough to use synonyms (so "canines" and "collies" would also be looked at), but you can't count on this.
There are millions of pages that would love to get your "dog" traffic, so search engines get a little more complex. They also look at the frequency and distribution of that keyword in your web page. Is it common at the top, but less so at the bottom? Do you use the term in your headers, your page title, your subheaders, and your metaterms (the hidden keyword sections in the HTML header of your page)? A complex algorithm puts all this information together and rates your page for relevance.
It also looks for spam. If you use the term "dog" as every other word, then clearly your page is not going to add a lot of value. If you use the term "dog" frequently in your metaterms but not once in the body of your text, search engines are going to rank your page down, or not at all. And your words must show some sort of grammatical structure.
Next, search engines look outside your page. Do you have a lot of people linking to you using the term "dog" in the link text? If you do, this is a huge boost.
What makes all this a challenge is the exact formulas search engines use is a closely guarded secret. And every search engine runs its searches in a slightly different way.
How You Can Use Articles To Get Traffic
Understanding how search engines work is a critical first step to optimizing your articles for search engines. Ensure, first, that the articles you have are good articles that add value to your website and are easy to read and understand. It won't do your business any good to get all the viewers in the world who read your articles, get bored, and move on.
Once you have your good-content articles, start optimizing. Make certain your keyword is present frequently in the headers and subheaders of your article; and use the H1-H6 hypertext header markup, not bolding and font size changes, to denote headers. Try to ensure that you have a 3-7% rate of appearance of your keyword in your article; the more often the keyword appears, the more likely the article will rate highly. Don't overdo it to the point that you ruin your article.
If you're not a writer, that's fine too. You can purchase private-label rights articles to place on your website. These articles have great informational content for your website's topic, and are pre-optimized within the text for your topic. You may have to tweak the keywords a little to ensure that you have everything in the right place, but you should have to do very little to perfect the articles.
Next, optimize the search engine text in your page: the page title and the metatags. Make sure your keywords appear in these critical sections.
Finally, try to encourage linking to your articles using your keywords. You can do this by exchanging links with other webmasters, or you can submit your articles to article directories, where other webmasters may download them for free in exchange for retaining a resource box containing your name, your site, and a URL link set up the way you want it to appear – ideally, with the keywords appearing in the link. It's better if you use articles different from the ones on your site, but equally good quality to draw more webmasters to use them.
About the Author
Cody Moya writes about Article Marketing in his free 50 parts course on Internet Marketing. You can sign up for his
Free Internet Marketing Course and get additional information at his website: http://www.marketing.us
Printed From: http://www.articlealley.com/article_38331_3.html
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Tags: web browser, search engines, first web, web pages, search engine, relevance, audience, engine technology, decade, dogs, lycos, niche markets, synonyms, article content, veronica, sophisticated technology, canines, collies