Most business owners have heard that a great way to get traffic to your website is by posting tons of content, specifically articles, on your site. The idea is that google will find your articles, index them for the most important or relevant words used (keywords), and those articles will show up in the google search results when people search for those keywords.
A majority of the traffic to The Wealth Spa comes in via this “organic” Google traffic, but this was not always true. Here are some tips to make full use of your articles so you don’t waste the benefits of all your hard work.
1. Power Your Website Using WordPress (behind the scenes)
Google loves blogs – it indexes them faster and checks them more often for new information. If you host your articles on a site using blogging software, google will find those articles faster and it is much more likely they will appear when people search for your most important/relevant words (keywords).
But your website doesn’t have to LOOK like a blog to be POWERED by blog software. You don’t need that ugly one-column, ordered by date, unprofessional look — your site can look like a magazine, a corporate site, or whatever you want — and still be a “blog” underneath.
2. Use the Right Permalinks
Sorry to get a bit technical on you — permalinks are permanent website html links that are not those weird coded, computer-generated links with tons of symbols or weird numbers. If you have a blog, the html link of each page will be a weird code (domain.com/?=234) unless you change it to something that a human (and google!) can read. For example, a recent post on my site was thewealthspa.com/rock-star instead of thewealthspa.com/?=301.
I recommend that your permalinks should be simply the title of your article, which works especially great if the title of your article has good keywords (see tip 3). Not only will this help google to find your article and increase it’s relevance in google’s eyes, but it will also make it much easier for human beings to link to you.
3. Write for Long Keyword Phrases
It’s going to be difficult for you to get traffic for using words like “money” or “diet” — too many people are trying to get traffic for those keywords. But if you are writing articles for long or specific search phrases, like “christian financial advisor in St. Louis” or “what’s the difference between a trademark and a copyright” it’s much easier to get the traffic.
How to research keywords is too much to cover here, but once you have thought of some good keyword phrases, use those words in your title and similar or related words especially in the first sentence/paragraph of your article. Another great tip is to use a picture that describes those keywords, and name the photo file with those search terms.
4. Link to Good Resources
Depending upon the topic of your article, there may be a few (3 or less) resources that would be helpful to a reader of your article. These resources may include government documents, a news article on cnn.com, a book on amazon.com, a video posted on youtube, or a recent study on the website of a university. Think of valuable resources you would share with a friend or client who is research the subject of your article.
Don’t over-do this tip, but if you give a few links inside your article to these type of “authority” websites, it can help google to release that your website is also an authority. But make sure to link to specific resources on the same topic (“deep link”) or google will think you are just trying to fool them with useless links.
©2009 Elizabeth Potts Weinstein
www.TheWealthSpa.com