User:Theologian/sandbox2

Creating articles that will bring the most traffic to a website

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 Canada, Google UK, Google Ireland, Google Australia, Google New Zealand. I do not privy to the innner working of Google but it makes sense if you cite highly ranked articles in Google Canada, Google UK it is certainly not going to hurt your article search engine rankings and will 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 making on of my most popular conservative articles on the internet (ranked #2 by Google out of 103,500,000 million 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/

2. Do not rely on the press or blogs to generate traffic for an article. 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. 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 ).

3. The primarly 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.

4. 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.

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. 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. 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 is not all the Google keywords associated with a topic. For example, if you go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal an type in "homosexuality" you will not see that "sexual abuse and homosexuality" is a keyword phrase but if you type in "homosexuality and sexual abuse" you will see that "sexual abuse and homosexuality" is in fact a Google keyword phrase.

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. The same applies to your non-keyword articles but don't be afraid to create short bios of various people you cite. Keep the reputation of your article strong.

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

13. 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. Incorporate pictures in the article as this gives the article a professional appearance

Here are some sources for finding pictures:

http://www.pdphoto.org

http://images.google.com/imghp?tab=wi

http://www.usa.gov/

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/

NASA and USGS photos

http://teachpol.tcnj.edu/amer_pol_hist/_use.htm

15. Put links to your articles on webpages on the website that the article resides on when it makes sense to do so.

16. Have a proofreader or proofreaders look over your article. I have been told there is a woman who will do this for free for conservative websites and I am going to try get ahold of her.

17. 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.

18. 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 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.

18. Periodically look at the talk pages for the article and incorporate reasonable suggestions.

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