Writing articles for long time but no traffic

Hi,

We have been writing articles for over a year now but have not gotten any traffic on them whatsoever! Do we need to build links for those articles so that they rank up on google?

Our competitors write articles with the same title and similar content; when searched on google, their articles and pages show up on the 1st on 2nd page, whereas ours is not even listed upto the 10th search results page on google.

Is publishing articles not enough? We don't have followers on google+, facebook and twitter, yet we always update those accounts whenever an article is published. That for sure will not drive referral traffic, but we think of it as link building.

What else do we need to do? Should we do directory submissions and randomly post links here and there? I know its not the proper way to do things, but then what else can we do?

 

Well, tell me one thing are you posting article over the article directories ?????

 

1. What's your site?
Whithout knowing that we can adviыe just general things:
2. You need strong link building (of all kinds -- forums, wikipedia, guestblogging, news, any advertorials...)
3. As to FB. Do you post it only in your profile/fan page, or put links to niche communities as well?
4. Try other social networks and social bookmarking sites

 

@John Dave thanks for responding.
I haven't been posting articles anywhere besides publishing them on my website.

How do I go about posting them to article directories? Where and how do I start?

 

The website is http://www.myphonedata.com/ and the blog URL is http://www.myphonedata.com/iphone-recovery/

 

1. I've found 83 backlinks to http://www.myphonedata.com/ and 40% of them are nofollow, most having low PR.
You need to build more.
2. Your PageRank is just 1. That's too low. Get backlinks from high-PageRank sites in your niche
3. You are not listed in Y!dir or DMOZ.
make some unique (not "similar" or "rewritten") content and try to apply for DMOZ.
If you have money, Yahoo might be worth it, but I'd invest it in buying high-PR backlink.

 

No, don't use the article directories because they are not going to help you, Why I was asking this question previously because I doubt that might the reason being not coming up over the search engines. But as you cleared it means the whole scenario is different, well do one thing open yup your Google Webmaster tool and look for any sort of manual penalty you've received? If there isn't then indulge yourself over the forums, yahoo answers,....... try to gain the backlink over the signature panel. Rest start sharing your blog post over the social networking site like fb, twitter, LinkedIn, .... what you need to do is try building a interest among other people out at social network once they feel that you are giving them some good sort of information. I am sure you will start getting traffic, I will also suggest you to look out your backlink and that to is needed to be done manually give it all the time that you have because it will worth giving.... !! Rest follow the Searchengineland updates i.e. get yourself updated with the changes coming with the SERPs and that would be enough...... All the best !!

 

Thanks to both of you for the advice.
@Karuna17 is it recommended that I buy high PR links? I tried doing so about a year ago over fiverr and all I got were temporary links from irrelevant websites (mostly forums of government and educational institutions).

@John Dave I do share blog posts over facebook, twitter and google+.. but there are no followers to read/distribute them! For the backlinks that currently exist, they usually don't drive any traffic due to irrelevancy and my site doesn't rank anywhere on google search results

Its a dire situation and I am really looking for ways to keep the site and products afloat.
Is there a step-by-step guide that I can follow for SEO and SEM which will help for sure? Reason being, that I don't think with the current fall in traffic, there will be any of it remaining in the next few months.

 

Actually as per the my opinion, if you want to increase your website traffic using blog, so you have to add unique content in your website. But as per you said that you have content then do proper interlink your article with others. And do some social bookmarking also on reddit, stumbleupon, delecious website. May be this will help you to increase your website traffic.

 

thanks for the pointer @smithrick

 

@Vivek Nanda I have checked your website blog and you have around 65.6% of original content:

sourses:

Maybe you should try to produce more unique content.

Also I've heard that google authorship can increase positions of articles. Does anyone know abou this?

 

Well, I think you are well aware what keeps you going up, I would say try to increase your social influence that can be done by following other people so they will follow you back you yourself indulge over some communities, participate over their discussion and if there is something (i.e. article) try to post them over the conversation and I am sure if you have that much quality over your article then it will surely going to yield result. Another thing you have talked about is the relevancy and I think this is the point where you have hit majorly and I guess once your figure out how to deal with it you will start getting traffic, I would say it would be better if you start removing those links which are not related to your niche I am pretty much sure this is going to affect you adversely rather than .....

 

Hi, Only Article is not enough. Article needed enough SEO. First you may need best seo for article.
Traffic Driven Method is ....
1. Organic Traffic
2. PPC
3. Social Media Traffic
4. Others
-> Forums
-> etc
You may try this method and got enough targeted traffic.

 

The sources from where you get backlinks also make a huge difference. It is important to consider suitable sources for publishing articles or any type of content. For example, if you are in a web hosting industry, find web hosting related websites for publishing your content.

 

I would really like to thank each and every one who has contributed in helping me out. Choosing 1 Best Answer won't do here as each one has helped me tap upon an entirely new facet of online marketing and SEO.
Your inputs have been vital and very valuable. Infact, I would also put them to practice for our new venture 'PaySketch' - it is an analytics platform for PayPal merchants that adds the power of BI to transaction logs.
Right now PaySketch is in its initial stage and I guess, the advise from all of you can be put to practice on it to get the start right.

Unfortunately, I can't even Like your answers and inputs because I don't have enough credentials (or likes) in my account to do so. Please consider this as a personal thank you message to each one of you.

 

@Vivek Nanda Good luck! Share with us your results after implementing ideas from this thread

 

Good luck!
Hari Om!

 

You mentioned that your competitors have similar content and the same titles in their articles. You need to watch out for duplicate content as has been mentioned above. Write articles that are unique that are different than what your competitors are talking about. Perhaps use FAQs that you receive from your customers and clients and write posts to answer those questions. You don't want even the title to be the same as an article by your competitor. You want to provide new information that people are looking for. As others have suggested share your posts on social bookmarking sites and continue to share on your own social sites as well.

You have to work on growing your social media presence. If you have an email list contact your clients and let them know you are on Facebook and Twitter, etc. and ask them to follow you. Ask your friends and family to follow you and share your stuff. Then post regularly. On Twitter it's especially easy to gain followers. Set a goal for the number of new people you will follow each week, for example at least 5 new Twitter users a week. When you follow others, they will frequently follow you back. Be sure that on your social accounts you share interesting things that other people post, don't just share your own stuff.

You've received some great tips from other posters here. If you follow the advice you should see some improvement.

 

@Jen 101 thanks a bunch for the advice regarding taking into account existing customer feedbacks for the kind of things they would like to see.

The primary reason why the articles I write and the ones published by my competitors have same title and similar content is being we are trying to help users solve a problem - now we can only define the problem in certain words (which becomes the title of the blog post), and the solution follows in similar stance (content). For example, if we published an article to recover iphone text messages then the blog title might be 'Recover iPhone Messages/SMS/Text Messages' with a 'How To' or similar phrase appended to it as a prefix or something in the trail. The content is a solution to the problem and that too will be (if not exactly the same), closely similar to what our competitors would write.

For example, have a look at this article that comes up on the 1st page on google - http://www.iphone-data-recovery.com/recover-sms-from-iphone.html for 'recover iphone text messages'
The website has no Page Rank, yet its alexa rank is around 200K with just 79 inward links, it gets over 50% of its traffic from search and the website was created less than a year ago (September 2013 - when the domain was purchased).
Now my website has had that as the title of one of the page for over 2.5 years http://www.myphonedata.com/products/textsaver
It doesn't rank anywhere upto the 4th search results page on google. This site has about 59 inbound links, gets just 17% traffic from search and was created over 2.5 years ago.

The competitor I've listed above has a more mundane looking website - it actually is a website of a reseller of a big company. What puzzles me that my website design is more organized and neater with on-page seo done, yet there is nothing that will help my website show up on google for any of the keywords that I have been working on. This was the reason why we moved our efforts from doing on page seo to writing content.. and it has been over a year now that we've been updating the blog, but the blog too doesn't get much traffic (its not even in double digits on many days).

PS: Stats mentioned above are from alexa and whois records