User:Theologian/sandbox2
Creating articles that will bring the most traffic to a website
If you have a weak website in terms of web traffic your best strategy in most cases is to build web traffic is a long-tail keyword strategy. The reason why the long-tail keyword strategy is best for a weaker website is that a weaker website has a harder time competing for popular searches. Since a large amount of web web traffic for a search goes to the top 5 to top 7 ranking websites for a search it is therefore better to be a big fish in small less popular search then be a sardine (low ranking site) for a popular search. Only 3% of people ever look beyond the first 30 results of a search engine query.
Here are some articles on the long-tail keyword strategy:
http://www.searchengineguide.com/matt-bailey/keyword-strategies-the-long-tail.php
http://www.doshdosh.com/how-to-target-long-tail-keywords-increase-search-traffic/
http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/three-good-reasons-to-target-long-tail-keywords/
http://www.marketinghub.info/long-tail-versus-short-tail-keywords/
Here is a popular tool to find the long-tail keywords: http://www.wordtracker.com/
Now if your website is strong enough you can start going after the more popular searches. How do you know if your website is strong enough? Well if your website is somewhere between weak and strong and cannot decide if you are ready to go after the popular searches I am willing to do a quick analysis of your website in conjunction with a very small consulting package or a larger one if you wish.
Now if you know you have a sufficiently strong website then here are some tips on ranking high for a popular search terms:
1. The article should have a very broad audience. For example, an article about the Apostle Paul is going to going to have more broad appeal than an article about a local pastor (No disrespect intended for the fine individuals who serve as local pastors). One of the keys to getting your article to the top of the search engines is the amount of GLOBAL links to your articles. Now given that a very large percentage of English speaking internet users are Americans it is suicide to be anti-American in your article. At the same time, you want English speakers from England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and India, and other countries to link to your articles. A way to optimize global links to your articles is to have the weight of your articles mention American events and American experts the most but also cite experts from England, New Zealand, Australia, and even non-English speaking countries where translations are available. In addition, mention other notable events/trends/statistics etc in other continents nations as well - particularly English speaking countries as these will be your main audience. There are a lot of Americans who do want to know about the rest of the world although there is certainly Americans who do not really care unfortunately. I generally stick to talking about the Western World in my articles as I think this will gain the most English speaking readers.
So how do you easily do research in regards to other English speaking countries? Well I am not a librarian but I can tell you that I have easily found some absolutely great information by using Google, Google Canada, Google UK, Google Ireland, Google Australia, Google New Zealand. I do not privy to the innner working of Google but it makes perfectly good sense if you cite highly ranked articles in Google Canada and Google UK it is certainly not going to hurt your article search engine rankings and will most likely help! You need to click the option to where you see only pages from that country in question.
In fact, a key piece of information in regards to creating one of my most popular articles on the internet (ranked #2 by Google out of 19,000,000 articles) I found at Google New Zealand.
Here are those websites:
Google UK: http://www.google.co.uk/ (click the option pages from the UK)
Google Canada: http://www.google.ca/ (click the option pages from Canada)
Google Ireland: http://www.google.ie/
Google Australia: http://www.google.com.au/
Google New Zealand: http://www.google.co.nz/
Google South Africa: http://www.google.co.za/
Google India: http://www.google.co.in/
The most important factor in getting your article to be top ranked by the search engines is by having high quality relevant content. By searching other english speaking countries articles you increase your chances of gaining a top search engine ranked article.
2. Again, the primary goal should be creating quality content. People are often much more likely to link to quality content than low quality content and inbound links are very important to gaining top Google rankings. Also, Google clocks how much time readers spend in an article and this partly determines your google ranking. Quality content encourages people to keep reading. Do NOT make any claims you do not reasonably support in the article. Readers will often blow off such an article and not read the rest of the article when they read such a claim or claims. This will reduce the amount of time they spend in your article and your Google rank will needlessly suffer. Plus people will often not be as likely to link to such articles which will greatly hurt your search engine rankings. Also, nothing will infuriate the opponents of an article more than an article than does not make unreasonable claims. This will create internet buzz/publicity for your article. Also cite your sources and do so via footnotes rather than bibiographies which are much less user friendly. Please keep in mind that Google ranks the links that you link to in an article. Obviously it is better to cite an authorative website than Joe's blog.
3. Have a strong opening and put the most relevant and interesting information at the top of the article and try to make a orderly progression to the article. Remember Google clocks the amount of time people spend in an article in regards to how it ranks an article.
4. One excellent way to getting a top ranked search engine article is to have unique or not well known information in your article. As mentioned earlier by searching Google New Zealand I was able to find some key information in relation to a conservative article that was not widely known in English speaking countries although it was a top ranked article in New Zealand for the topic. In addition, by doing other research using both internet and print sources I was able to create unique content in a article which is a top ranked article on the internet for a topic which is hotly contested between liberals and conservatives. In other words there was a lot of competition I faced when I achieved the #2 Google ranking. If you create some unique material in your article people will be more likely to cite your article with a link.
5. Handle some of the more important objections to a position (for example, pro-life) when it is reasonable to do so. Avoid petty objections. Also, make reasonable concessions regarding a position (and again, while providing reasonable rebuttals of objections if possible ) and when writing about a person or movement point out the foibles of people when it is appropriate to do so as it is better they find out about these from the article than from other websites (obviously you do not want to major on the minors and talk about a parking ticket the person received). Gaining readers trust is vitally important and trust has to be earned. The Bible often points out the notable foibles of its main inviduals and so should the article you are writing or helping to write.
6. As of November 30, 2007 the company http://www.google.com had about 78% percent of the market share for search engine traffic. (see: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=4 ). Set a goal that you or your team are going to reach the top 3 Google results because the top 3 Google rankings get the most web traffic. At the very least you or your team want to be in the top 5 results. I wish at this time that we could build an article on Jesus Christ that would reach the top 3 Google results, however, sometimes people pay to be in the top Google results and I think this is what is happening in the Jesus Christ search inquiry. Anyways the competition is super fierce to get in the top results for the search term Jesus and at this time I don't think we have enough general web traffic to our website to make this feasible at this time. However, other than the Jesus Christ Google search query I think it is most doable for most other searches.
7. Once you or your team pick an article topic find out what words or phrases people type in Google to search for information on a topic. These words and phrases are called Google keywords. A list of Google keywords is located here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
8. Ideally the article title should be a Google keyword or keywords (phrase). The main keyword or keywords that the article is titled with should be used somewhat liberally throughout the article but it shouldn't be forced so it is very unnatural writing or the article will be penalized. The amount of times the article uses the Google keywords in a article is referred to as keyword frequency and it is easily implemented and easily measured (using a website). Here are some articles regarding the key word frequency how it effects webpage rankings with the search engines:
http://www.firstpagefitness.com/blog/2006/07/14/keyword-denstity-versus-keyword-frequency/
http://www.searchengineguide.com/beal/2003/0205_ab1.html
http://www.bytestart.co.uk/content/promotion/7_6/keyword-density-why-keywo.shtml
Here is the keyword frequency checker: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/
9. Use the list of Google keywords associated with the title of the article in your article in a reasonable way (see: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) as this is very important. Do not "stuff' these words into the article but use the most natural keywords and do it in a reasonable way. An example of Google keyword stuffing would be having an article on "Communism" and having the following "sentence":
Karl Marx socialist party marxism Soviet Union Karl Marx. The previous "sentence" was made up entirely of Google keywords and Google will heavily penalize for such gimics.
10. Create sub articles which the main article links to and have these articles be Google keywords although certainly not all of the sub articles have to be google keywords (for example, you might cite an expert and have a short article on this expert). Having relevant, quality, and interesting content is key and don't be afraid to create sections in your article or sub articles attached to your main article that are not Google keyword related. The Google keywords merely tell you what the public is aware of and has a demand in knowing more about. If you or your team uncover relevant and interesting information that the public doesn't know about this will drive traffic to your article so again don't be afraid to create non-Google keyword material in your article or non Google keyword subarticles that are linked to your main article.
In regards to the Google keyword sub articles, link these articles to the main article which you or your team are focused on making a Google top contender. The sub Google keyword(s) articles often are very popular and create traffic for your main article. Also, the main article creates traffic for your sub Google keyword articles. This creates a "vicious circle effect" in terms of creating webtraffic to the articles. You or your team might have to be a little patient as the Google web crawlers will likely find the main Google keyword article before it finds your sub Google keyword(s) articles. Please keep the use of Google keywords reasonable and natural in the article. The programmers of Google are not of low intelligence and I would think an article that uses every single Google keyword might be suspicious plus it would be very time consuming to create quality articles for a myriad of google keywords. Also, this is would be likely gimicy and you might not be really focusing on creating relevant and quality information. Again relevancy and quality are of prime importance and should not be subordinated to the over use of Google keywords that may not be relevant to your article. You or your team can also look at the Google keywords for these sub keyword articles so these rank highly (again see: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ). When appropriate also look up the google keywords for these sub Google keyword articles. For example, if you are writing an article on Communism you would create an article with the google keywords "Karl Marx" and look up the Google keywords for Karl Marx (again see: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ).
11. When you are creating Google keyword articles the Google keywords associated with a topic that are found here https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal are not necessarily all the Google keywords associated with a topic.
12. Don't create a Google Keyword sub article until its ready. It is better to wait until you do further research and write a good Google sub keyword article rather than disappoint your readers with something of low quality.
13. When creating sub Google keyword articles it is vitally important that these articles are not 17% or more similar to your main Google keywords articles or 17% or more similar to other articles on your website. Google heavily penalizes articles that are too similar and this is called a search engine "duplicate content penalty" (see: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/duplicate-content-penalty-how-to-lose-google-ranking-fast/1886/ ). This is a very important point and should not be neglected.
Here is a website to check how similar the articles created are to other webpages so you avoid the duplicate content penalty: http://www.webconfs.com/duplicate-content-filter-article-1.php
14. It is perfectly acceptable to use information in other articles and to quote them. However, do not make the main Google keyword article or the sub Google keyword articles 17% or more similar to the sources used (see step #8 above). Again this is a very important issue.
14. In relation to political articles, do not rely on the press or blogs or internet forums to generate traffic for an article unless you plan on posting on some of the big blogs or forums. If a topical area has very prominent blogs or forums and you post on them it can provide a boost for your articles and create internet buzz. If the article is an issue article post on both liberal and conservative blogs. However, this step should only be used to kickstart an already good article as may only create a short term effect. Kickstarting an article can be important because once the targeted audiences are initially reached word of mouth can sustain an article. Also, given that the majority of the press is liberal (but generally not totally radical leftist [revolutions, etc.]) it is wishful thinking to believe the liberal press will be of much help for views outside their political ideology. If it happens that is great but consider that icing on the cake. Often the blogs find out about an article because it has a fairly high profile via the search engines which are generating traffic for the article.
15. Incorporate pictures in the article as this gives the article a professional appearance
Here are some sources for finding pictures:
http://images.google.com/imghp?tab=wi
http://www.yahoo.com/ (look at the top center of the page )
http://digital.nypl.org/mmpco/index.cfm
http://karenswhimsy.com/public-domain-images/
http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/_use.htm
16. Put links to your articles on webpages on the website that the article resides on when it makes sense to do so. Your key articles should be accessible within 3 clicks on your main page.
17. Have a proofreader or proofreaders look over your article. You can also use spellchecking programs and the software package Style Writer which helps you write in a more clear manner (see: http://www.writeexpress.com/StyleWriter/stylewriter-introduction.html ).
18. Call or email other websites that are related to the website article and have them link to the main article and/or sub articles associated with the article. Often this can make a big difference although I would not rely on it. Wait until your article is of good quality before you do this.
19. Here is an email I received from a internet search engine expert regarding the above 17 steps: Your blueprint looks good. I would add that it is important for Google to view your site as authoritative and as a hub – that is done by externals links with keyword phrase you are targeting as anchor text. For instance if you are writing an article on “Darwin’s theory of evolution” – have links to high-authority websites – like http://www.darwins-theory-of-evolution.com (which is ranked #2 by Google for the search term theory of evolution and #1 for the search term Darwin's theory of evolution) with the anchor text being something like “Darwin’s Theory of Evolution” or “Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution” or “Theory of Evolution.” It is important to occasionally vary the anchor text to external articles or you will receive an over-optimization penalty.
20. Periodically look at the talk pages for the article and incorporate reasonable suggestions. Also, if you post links to your articles in internet forums or blogs you can get useful feedback.
Here is an interesting article for those who are interested in creating an article which gets a lot of internet traffic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-little-piece-of-the-google-algorithm-revealed
Seo Digger:
