Do you have a web presence? Today, many people do, whether it's a personal home page, a blog, a small business, or a fully integrated web business. There are many people in the world who believe that if it's not found on the internet, it just doesn't exist. Because of this, most businesses, even ones that provide services or products at bricks and mortar location, have some type of a web presence to showcase their company, provide information, offer quotes or prices, or any number of other things. This is great, but having a web presence does no good if no one can find your website to visit it.
So just how do you get traffic to your website?
There are a lot of ways to do this, including but not limited to: advertising (print, radio, banner ads, pay per click ads, linkbacks, and more), word of mouth, blogging, and a ton of others. However, one of the most effective ways to gain traffic, while also marking yourself as an expert in your field, is to write articles web content articles.
Just what can web content articles do for you?
Well, let's start with putting articles on your website itself first, and then move on to branding and spreading your knowledge across the internet. Putting content articles on your website itself, provided they are properly keyword optimized for search engines, helps to achieve higher placement for relevant keyword searches in the major search engines. The more quality information and content on your site that matches the keywords for your site's products or services, the more likely your website will rank higher for specific keywords. The higher your site ranks in search engines and directories, the more likely an internet surfer is to click on your site.
Additionally, when your site contains quality content articles, that are information, interesting, or entertaining, but that also pertain to your products or services, the more likely your website viewers are to spend more time on your site. When you keep the content fresh, update it regularly, and ensure the content articles provide information the surfer seeks, the more likely the internet surfer will return to your site to read more informational content articles. The longer or more often you can bring viewers to your site, the more likely you are to make a sell of a product or service.
But having quality content articles on your site alone is not always enough. These quality content articles will keep interested web surfers coming back, but you also need to reach out and bring people to your site too. That's why you want to find article submission websites, where you can write quality content articles to be picked up for syndication and reprint.
Most of these sites are free, some charge a small fee, but what these sites do is allow you to write quality content keyword articles that others who publish ezines, newsletter, blogs, or have their own websites can pick up and reprint or put into some type of syndication on the web, and they will reprint these articles with your author's resource information, which should include links back to your website.
You should write articles that pertain to the product or service your website provides, and as such, if the content is informative, interesting, and provides what a reader might want to know about your product or service, you set yourself up on the internet as an expert in your field.
For example, I am a freelance writer. I write quality content articles for websites. Therefore, one of the areas I focus on with my writing is all about how to properly optimize an article for keyword saturation and optimization. Perhaps that seems like giving away my services for free, and while many will learn something from me for free, there will be some that will read my articles and visit my website and choose to hire me to do their article writing for them.
If 1,000 people read my articles, that take me a short time to write to brand myself as an expert in this field, and only 1% of those people choose to hire me to write their articles for them, I have gained 10 new customers, for just 30 minutes to an hour of my time to write the article that promoted keyword services. At this point, it doesn't matter to me that 990 other people received free information what matters is that I made new customers, as well as branding my name as an expert in my field.
I am also a freelance editor. Most of my editing work is with authors directly or through small to mid-sized publishing companies, but I also work with article writers and businesses on formatting, proofreading, and editing web copy, articles, brochures, eBooks you name it, I'll edit it. So I write a lot of articles for article submission sites about grammar and punctuation, writing hints and tips, and other such writing articles that show I know what I'm doing, I am familiar with editing techniques, etc. This again, brands me as an expert in my field.
For those who don't need my services, they learn something for their own writing, and this is great. Again, just a 1% conversion can bring a lot of business my way, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I've helped others who didn't bring business my way. Remember also, word of mouth is important in any business venture, so even those who may not purchase products or services from you may turn around and tell someone else who will, because you come across knowledgeable about the product or service you provide.
If you sell health food products, then write a series of articles about health foods. Be general in your article, not specific about just your products. If you sell a weight loss supplement, then write some quality content articles about weight loss, weight loss supplements, and compare and contrast what's on the market today. Make yourself and your website come across as experts in the weight loss field, and then people will more likely trust your products, because you know what you are talking about in your articles.
The key is not to make a content article come across as an advertisement for your site. Advertising has its purpose, and you can indeed purchase advertising for your site or business, but quality content articles should not be advertisements for your products. Keyword content article are all about providing information, and setting you up as an expert in your field, and promoting your site should be the secondary function of a quality content article.
Quality content articles should be long enough, at least 250-300 words, to get a good amount of keyword optimization and provide quality content, but not so long that the reader is intimidated to read it. Articles are best when between 400-800 words, and anything over about 1200 words is probably too long for this type of marketing your business knowledge. If you have an article that is more than 1200 words, really look at the article closely and see if there is a way you can make two articles of about 600 words, instead of one longer article.
You see, the internet user has a short attention span. They are used to on-demand information, but there is so much of it, that reading long, drawn-out articles is not a top priority. Condense your information to the key points of the article. Make only one or two key points per article, and really focus on those topics. Don't try to get all the information you know into just one article. Every point of information you may know can be a new article, and the more quality content articles you have, the more chance one will be picked up and redistributed, thus giving you many visitors to your site.
Also, web pages are made to fit mostly on the computer screen if the article is too long and requires several pages views to read the entire article, or if the user has to scroll and scroll to read, they may choose not to read, or to just skim the article, and thus they may miss some of the vital information you wish to relay.
Catchy titles are great for newsprint or magazines, but not so great for the internet. Your titles should be long enough to give clear information about what the article contains, while also having the main keywords of your topic included. This will help with search engine placement for your articles, as well as making sure people can actually find the article based on what they would enter into a search bar.
Now, it's important to note that the information I provide here does not necessarily pertain to writing articles for online magazines or ezines or blogs. No, this information is only for quality content articles that are used as marketing tools to promote your products or services on the internet. When writing for other publications online, the rules differ. Read the guidelines of each publication or website to determine what is best for those types of articles.
One of the best article submission sites I have found, one that drives the most amount of traffic to my websites, is Ezine Articles.
There are several others out there where I have received pretty high search engine placement as well. Some of these include: Buzzle, SearchWarp, ad GoArticles.
There are many others, and all you have to do is search the internet for article submission sites" and you'll see as many as you could possible want to chose from. Sign up for a few of the free ones and write up a few articles for each, and then watch how those articles appear on the web and watch the traffic to your site, and see which ones work best for you. Then you can narrow down which ones you will submit to regularly.
The last tip I'll give for writing quality content articles is this: write regularly. The more fresh and current your articles are, the more likely you will be to be picked up for syndication or reprint, and thus, the more traffic that comes your way.
Good luck in promoting your business, product or service through writing quality content articles for the internet.