Read Cody Moya’s featured article titled “Articles and Keywords”


Cody Moya’s featured article is reprinted here.

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Articles and Keywords

The Internet is driven primarily by content. Content is driven primarily by keywords.

New websites are designed to attract new visitors, as many as possible. By going through the steps to make certain that your content, and then your keywords, are just right, you can keep your search engine rankings high and maximize your new visitors. By maintaining fresh content constantly, your established visitors will keep coming back.

What’s Your Theme?

The theme of your website is basically the purpose of it. Are you here to sell a product? Or are you more interested in informing people about something, reviewing other products, or cataloging something?

Most people take their theme and run straight to – graphics. And why not? Graphics are fun. Create your company logo, get it just right. Take pictures of your products, toss on some fancy Flash animations, maybe stick a dancing GIF email down at the bottom of the page so people will see the movement and email you. You’re done now, right? The intro page is awesome and forces viewers to go through it, the bells and whistles are impressive, and the logo says exactly what you want.

Here’s the truth.

Most customers remain on a website for a maximum of ten seconds before giving up. If it takes your graphics-laden site more than that to load, they won’t wait for it before clicking the back button and going to the next store on the search engine list. Animations distract your customers from what you’re selling. Fancy logos are largely a waste of time until you’re a huge company worried about brand recognition don’t bother with designing a complicated logo. Keep it simple.

The most important item on your website, and the item most often ignored, is good solid content. Keyword rich content. Content that makes the customer go “wow,” and then bookmark your site to come back to later.

Search engines catalog content, not images. Why? Content is recognizable and categorizable to automated programs used to map the Internet; images (except in certain cases) are not. And when customers look for pages for information, they are generally looking for informative text, not your bells and whistles or your logo.

Rich descriptive words make your site rise in search engine rankings. Some fortunate webmasters are also prolific writers, and can whip up content articles in a jiffy to toss up on their websites. If you’re not one of this fortunate group though, you can purchase articles and place them on your website as your own. Or you can use free articles from an article exchange (beware – there is a hidden pitfall here. More later.) This unique and fresh content is vital to your site’s success.

The perfect content article delivers easily-understood and useful information to the reader. It also is keyword-rich – that is, it focuses on specific words that the search engines will subsequently catalog and use to rank your site in the listings it returns to searchers. Your first job before writing (or hiring someone to write) your articles is to determine what keywords your customers will likely use to search for sites like yours. One place you can do this easily is at http://www.nichebot.com. Nichebot and similar sites can inform you on what search terms are most often used to find websites like yours.

Keywords should be listed in the metatags, headings, and description of your site, as well as sprinkled through at least the first portion of the article. This tells the search engine spiders how to catalog your site. Fresh and unique content keeps the spiders ranking you higher, and it keeps your customers coming back. Your content should be organized, easy to scan as well as to read, and user friendly. It should also be spread among your pages, not just on your index page. Avoid heavy graphics, and make sure your site is free of spelling and grammatical errors.

Now, about those article exchanges. Deals that are too good to be true usually are, and article exchanges offer you free, well-written content that you can use on your website at will. What’s wrong with that? Article exchanges also require that you include something called a resource box. This box contains information about the author of the article, including his or her website link.

By using this, you’re telling your customers: I’m not really the guru here, but you can click here to get to the site of the guy who is. What are they going to do?

Well, what would you do? Click to the other guy’s site, of course.

If you must use article exchanges to get your site going, follow the rules, but try to replace it with content you own as quickly as you can. This makes you into what you should have been: the information guru for your site.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cody Moya writes about Article Marketing in his Free Courses on Internet Marketing. You can sign up for his free Courses and get additional information at his website: http://FreeInternetMarketingCourses.com

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*IMNewswatch would like to thank Cody Moya for granting permission to reprint this.