I've heard the whole hubub about writing good articles that let a lot more traffic into a site. I run a gadget blog and would like to know if this is true (stats would be great). Would this be a good idea? Skinny
Well the only way to get traffic is to have a reason for people to visit your site, and generally that is either by having articles, or by having tools or services that people are interested. Articles won't increase traffic directly, but they will get the SE's to leech on to your site, which in the long run should bring in traffic.
I think that sounds like a direct increase. If you add an article, Google will add that content to its database, and when someone searches for the topic, your article will appear in the search results. So suddenly Google is sending people to read your article. If 1 article gets you 1 visitor/day, 100 articles may get you 100 visitors/day. And if your site navigation is good, the people who read 1 article may be enticed to view other areas of your site. I guess you could say that the article is indirectly increasing traffic, because it's really Google who is sending in visitors. But Google does that based upon what articles you have. It's cause & effect: add article, readers read it. (Personally, I like providing services better. Someone who comes to read an article may come once or twice, read everything, and be done. Someone who comes to play a Web-based game, or to use SEO tools, will probably come back repeatedly to use that again. Of course, that's just my gut feeling. I haven't done extensive research.) -T
in my opinion single, "random" articles about high paying themes *cough* *cough* aren't worth the time nor the trouble. You have to start reading up on a topic that is - in most cases - not very simple or easy to understand and spend valueable time researching stuff. The second option would be MANY articles on a topic where you feel "secure" and where you write an article because you know what you want to express about that theme without much research being involved. Now a whole site filled with quality articles about the same topic is a whole different thing. It invites people to stay and raises not only your googlebot-hits but your repeat traffic of actual visitors that browse your site, bookmark it and come back whenever they feel that your site probably has something to offer they'd otherwise search for. That's what quality content does to your surfers, they remember your site and eventually come back. And this is how the internet really works, and it's definately not how the search engines want the WWW to be... repeat traffic (eg. by bookmarks) is YOUR traffic and no google algo change or SE penalty can take it away unless you stop caring about your website and scare your surfers away because they now found a better site). These surfers did not see Google's or MSN's ads before they enter your site to read your articles. I hope that I make sense.
I wrote an article a day for 1 working week (5 articles), submitted to every article database I could find, and then monitored my traffic for a month. After about three weeks my Google SERP rankings for some excellent keywords shot through the roof. I swear by articles now!!
Articles are one of the most important factors in getting lots of sustained traffic over the long term, especially if they are keyword optimized and indexed by all the search engines.
Article in my opinion are very hard work. If you do it for inbound links to help you in the search engines, then you are going to have a hard time. The problem is the duplicate filter now the because the article remains the same it is pretty much guaranteed to flag up as a duplicate, so even if your article gets published on 100 websites, only one will count and they might not even add your link. So to get 10 links you would probable need to write at least 15 good articles. But the article themselves may bring traffic to your site, I hear you say! Well sometimes. To get people to publish your article they have to be written in a certain manner. The reason why most people don't get many article published is because they write advertisements, they just write article selling their product or service. Very few people want to publish these kind of articles. To get published they need to be informative/entertaining. But if you write a informative/entertaining piece that is not made to advertise, the reader usually won't have any good incentive to go to your site. Usually webmasters publish article to make their site better rather than to send people away. I find this one of the hardest way to market online.
I've had some success with writing articles not in the sense that I got alot of traffic but that my pages ranked better in MSN and Yahoo....which eventually led to traffic. I'm still in the sandbox with google so I can't really say how I will be affected when I get out. Overall, i think it can only do good. Try to vary the article that you put on your website from the article that you submit to ezine, etc. Doesn't have to be totally different though...
A good well written article can feature your website on some high-traffic website. You'll get more traffic in one day than you'll ever get from search engines My recommendation is: write to get noticed by others, search engines picking your articles is just a plus.
The question of traffic increase caught my eye and I had to inquire why you want an increase in traffic to your site? I've written articles and had articles written for customers, but I've always targeted an increase in sales as the performance measure and purpose. I know some sites are selling clicks and such and some are focused on their Alexa ratings so they can claim higher revenues for advertising space which require them to get more traffic. But, even those efforts should focus on the revenues gained from article writing. If you can determine which efforts are paying you the most income you can weed out the work you do that doesn't pay.
I would say that keeping original content can get you much more traffic the submitting articles to article directories. Original content can bring in a large amount of traffic, many of our customers surround the ecommerce sites they own with original content related to the products the sell. According to them, this drives a very large percentage of the sales for them.
They have helped drive traffic to my site, but after adding my article to my site, it gets picked up by newsnow.co.uk and that drives alot of visitors my way.
CC said it well. The thread seems to be discussing 2 different tools....articles on your site (content) and articles submitted to others. As for articles that become content on your site, one really important advantage is the possibility of receiving natural links. That is why I spend so much time on content, it is such a good way to get quality links. And often the content you least expect is what gets the attention.
Keywords are a huge part of it. Obviously if you make a site about 'silver spoons' and have a billion articles, you aren't going to get much traffic no matter how many articles you have unless someone is in love with silver spoons. Get popular keywords and make sites for them. High paying keywords, as mxlabs said, are not always popular ones, but they do pay high in adsense profits if you're wanting to make revenue from your site. However, you CAN get a good mix between high paying keywords and popular keywords by looking at the keyword popularity ranking as well as its Keyword Effectiveness ranking. Goodluck! --- 800 high paying keywords for sale
According to Overture the words "Silver Spoons" was searched for 8191 times in November . If you sold silver spoons or was a spoon collection site you couldn’t ask for a better way to get targeted visitors. My point is not everyone uses articles to make money on adsense, but it is a very viable option.
How do your customers surround their sites with original content? Do they have blogs on their sites? Or do they create extra pages with content? I've been thinking about doing something like this to one of my sites. I have a product that can tend to be a bit confusing. It would be very helpful to have extra content that would just inform possible customers.
Normally they have an article section, some use blogs but not many. The articles can link back to the products they sell. For example you could sell garden products and have articles on building waterfalls, using theme's, etc. You could sell vitamins and have articles on different vitamins and what they cure and are known for. Some products are easier then others.