The easiest way to increase your sales conversion
"The Online Marketer's & Website Owner's Legal Information Clinic"
Author: Kalena Jordan
How to Find Free Content for your Web Site
By Kalena Jordan (c) 2007
I see a lot of webmasters complain in forums and chat rooms that
they don't have enough content on their web sites, but they
don't have the means or the knowledge to find more.
There are actually many ways to obtain more web site content.
You could hire someone to write it for you. You could purchase
some ready made content about your site topic or you could spend
some time and write content yourself. But did you know that
there is a way you can get hundreds of pages worth of high
quality, fresh content every day without paying a cent? There
is. It's called article syndication.
Article Syndication
Articles relating to thousands of topics are freely available
for syndication on web sites. Authors provide them for this
purpose to gain a wider audience and achieve more back links.
Generally, the only requirement for webmasters is that the
author's by-line, resource box and link are included with the
published article. In terms of copyright, you simply need to
follow the author's publishing guidelines when republishing
their article. This usually involves an "About the Author"
paragraph at the bottom of each article with a sentence and link
to the author's site. These syndication requirements are
generally specified in the article itself.
How to do it:
1) Browse the Internet to find articles you can syndicate. I
use the article announcement groups at Yahoo Groups
(http://groups.yahoo.com/), but you can also find them at
sources such as Submit Your Articles
(http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/).
2) View the articles being distributed by the group and review
their freshness and quality.
3) Join the email list or subscribe to the RSS feed of any
article groups that seem to be distributing content relevant
to your web site.
4) Check your email or feed reader regularly to browse and
select new articles.
5) Cut, paste and publish the articles into your web pages,
giving credit to the author as requested in their syndication
guidelines.
6) Voila! Fresh, daily content.
Articles for Blogs
If the article content is to be used on a blog, there is an even
quicker way to publish it. Depending on what blog software you
use, you can simply forward the email containing the article
directly to your blog control panel using the publish via email
option and then edit the post to correct any formatting issues.
The other advantage of this method is that search engines LOVE
blogs and tend to index them more often than regular web pages.
I use blog article syndication quite successfully for a couple
of my clients. One is in the travel industry and the other has a
large wedding portal. I simply subscribe to articles on travel
and wedding related topics and publish them to the blogs
belonging to each client. My clients supplement these with
articles and blog posts written by their own staff or hired
writers.
Advantages
There are a number of advantages to using article syndication:
Relevant, Timely Content - You can choose content that is
closely geared to your existing content and of interest to your
audience. For example, if you sell airline tickets, publish
travel articles about exotic destinations. The idea there is
that persons reading travel articles might be thinking about
traveling themselves and need to be reminded to book their
plane tickets.
Cross Promotion - You can choose content that gives you the
opportunity to up sell to your own products or affiliate
products. For example, if you sell scented candles online, you
could choose to publish articles about increasing the romance in
your marriage and then include a link at the end of the article
to your candle sales catalog (would you like fries with that?).
SEO Value - Apart from the obvious value of having fresh content
regularly available for indexing, there are other SEO advantages
to article syndication. Most articles are keyword-rich, meaning
that they contain a lot of keywords and phrases that people
might use in search queries. Publishing these articles means
that your site has a better chance of being found for related
search queries. One of my clients noticed their syndicated
article pages ranking in the top 10 Google SERPs for target
keywords within two days of publishing! You can also embed links
within the articles or at the end of articles to related areas
of your site using keyword-rich anchor text.
Increased Traffic & Sticky Content - It's not only search
engines that love fresh content. You'll find that you'll attract
more visitors when you publish relevant articles. Provided you
find ways to interact with your new visitors such as allowing
them to comment or sign up for your article feed, your site will
become stickier and retain those visitors more easily.
Disadvantages
There are really only two disadvantages that I can think of
about using article syndication. One is that the same article
published on various web sites can sometimes be treated by
search engines as duplicate content. So generally, a search
engine will try to determine the original source of the article
and index/rank that page while ignoring all other versions. If
you publish a fresh article quickly enough, you can sometimes be
lucky and have your version of the article picked up and treated
as the *original*. The other disadvantage is that it can be
time-consuming to trawl through the hundreds of new articles
announced daily and choose the ones you want. You also have to
scan them carefully to ensure accuracy of facts and to check if
the author has used correct spelling and grammar usage. But
compared to the costs of paying somebody to write articles from
scratch, I think this is a very minor inconvenience.
Want to get the jump on your competition and increase your
traffic? Use article syndication to publish fresh, relevant
content on your site every day.
============================================
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine
optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and
respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well
as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column
(http://www.searchenginecollege.com/blog.htm), Kalena manages
Search Engine College (http://www.searchenginecollege.com/) -
an online training institution offering instructor-led short
courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine
Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
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