It is beneficial to website owners to have plenty of content in their websites. It is true that sites that contain a lot of useful content tend to get more traffic than smaller ones. This is because search engines prefer websites that have a large amount of content and they will give these sites better rankings than those that have less content.
How do you get the content you need for your website?
With the understanding that content is so important in the promotion of websites, website owners have tried ways and means to add more articles to their websites. Most of them choose to hire writers to produce more content for their websites, but this can be very costly, considering the fact that quite a lot of articles are needed to score well with the search engines. Even if you have the financial resources to hire writers to do a large number of articles, you will still have to deal with incompetent writers who are unable to produce articles that meet your standards. Some website owners are skilled enough to write articles themselves, but it does take a lot of effort to produce so many articles on the same subject. After working on a few articles, you may find that you are running out of ideas, and the task becomes more and more difficult. So, what should you do? Well, the solution is free content.
A great source of free content is article directories
In recent years, many website owners are turning to article directories to get the content they need for their websites. The main reason why article directories are so popular these days is because they offer articles for free. Other than that, they also have a wide selection of articles that can be used for website promotion. When you visit one of the more popular article directories on the internet, there are thousands of articles that are available for use. These articles are categorized under different fields of interest, and for better specialization, they are further divided into a number of sub-categories. Therefore, you can select articles that belong to the same niche as your website. If you are trying to achieve high rankings on the search engines, it helps if content is all on a niche theme.
How to get free content from article directories?
You don't really have to do much, actually. The first thing you have to do is become a member of the article directory of your choice. After that, you can just use any of the articles that are posted there. There is no need to worry about copyright rules because the authors are conscious of the fact that their articles will be used for the purpose of website promotion; so, it is legally acceptable. The other thing that you have to do is display a back link when you post the articles in your website. This is to inform the readers that you have gotten the articles from the specified sources.
Article directories offer free content to anyone who is willing to post the "author resource" box following the article. The author resource box usually contains one or two links to the author's web page and a link back to the article directory. Before you run away screaming about bleeding page rank, read on and find out how you can do the right thing, get unique content and still keep the author and article directories happy.
The typical way that a publisher (web master) uses content from an article directory is to go to their prospective article and click on the "Ezine Ready" link. This will give you the option of a text or HTML version of the article, then they post the content in their blog. The article sits, in it's entirety on one page of the blog. This technique works just fine, but if we refine it a bit, you will see better results.
First let's talk about some options in your blog engine (Wordpress, Serendipity, Drupal) they all have these options, but they may be called something different. These options are "category" and "extended body". Using these options can have a major effect on how well you're article directory content works for you.
The category blog option is pretty self explanatory, it lets you divide your blog up into relevant sections. A sports blog could be split up by sport for example. Football, baseball, hockey could all be different categories, then when you make posts to your blog, you assign each post to a category. This much you already know, but have you thought about the implications to search engines?
The extended body option in your blog allows you to split up long posts. It essentially allows you to put a "summary" right up front, then the reader needs to click "continue reading" to read the rest of the article. Why in the world would they do this? Well, it's sort of a throw back to the old style in newspapers and magazines. You know, where they have ten stories on the front page, but only part of the stories. To continue reading you need to flip deeper into the newspaper. This allowed newspapers to have more headlines visible to the reader, more headlines equals more readers. So, now you know about the extended body, but have you thought about the implications to search engines?
What are these search engine implications I keep talking about? Well, consider how the search engine sees your web site. It sees it in pages, not articles. So what pages do the search engines see for your typical sports blog. There is the main page, one page for each category and each full article itself is a page. So if you don't use categories, you don't have the category page, if you don't use extended text, you have two full copies of the article on your site, the main page version and the full article version.
Now, consider this set up. Split your site up into categories (football, baseball, hockey) and only display the first paragraph or two of any given article, using the extended body for the rest. Now let's look at your site.
You have a front page consisting of summaries from ten or so unrelated articles (well, mostly unrelated), but since the author resource box for articles is at the end, there are no links out from your main page (yay)! The category page now becomes the same summaries, but only for one category. This way, it is more focused, more targeted and more keyword rich, again since you are using extended body there are no outbound links on this page (yay)! Then there is your full article page. The entire article, including the author resource box is on this page. This is the only spot on your site where the full article exists, so you won't suffer a duplication penalty and even if the same article exists on one hundred other sites, you still have unique content on your main page and category page (because they are a mix of different articles), so Google or other search engines will see these pages as entirely unique content.
I guess the question you need to ask yourself is whether or not this technique is morally correct. I look at it this way, the author of the article wants exposure and links back to his/her site. If the article is good, then your user will click on the "continue reading" link and read the entire article including the author resource box. The author still gets the links to his/her site, your site gets unique content and doesn't suffer massive page rank bleeding, everybody wins.
Both Dave & Jon Murray are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Dave has sinced written about articles on various topics from Types of Cancer, Home Management and Work From Home. For all of your . Dave's top article generates over 90500 views. to your Favourites.
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