(Cody Moya’s featured article.)
Engines run almost everything today, and the Internet is no exception. Search engines are the beating heart of online commerce. If you aren’t listed well on the search engines, you probably will not do well online in general.
Most people don’t know how to get their sites listed on the engines (while others, unfortunately, know too well!). This is a problem for both vendor and customer. You’ve had the experience of searching for something, finding what looks like a good relevant website on Google, and clicking it – to find a huge links site masquerading as good content squatting there instead.
Why do they get ranked high instead of you? Because they know the secrets of search engine placement.
Search engines look for keywords. These are words placed in strategic spots on your page that tell the search engines what your web site is all about. This isn’t like the AOL system of selling keywords; instead, Google and other major search engines are seeking out content on your website relevant to the searches that their customers enter. For instance, if you sell model trains, your keyword would be “model trains” (okay, it’s a phrase, but it works the same way). You want people looking for “model trains” to come to your website.
So does Google. They make their money on people being able to find what they’re seeking. And what they’ve found is that most people selling “model trains” have that phrase sprinkled liberally throughout their home page, and often on subsequent pages of the site. If you ensure that “model trains” shows up on your page frequently and in appropriate places, Google will rank you higher than your competitor who does not.
But back to those obnoxious links sites. At one point, they placed high because they did something called “search engine spamming.” They would place those coveted keywords everywhere – having perhaps a 50% mention of the keywords. It turned out to be text like: “The model trains of the model trains go through model trains to model trains.” Grammatical, sure. But also utter nonsense.
For this reason, search engines have learned that a really high keyword mention is a sure sign of search engine spam, and they won’t list these sites. Don’t do it.
Text Generators
Other vendors have been turning to text generators. These are programs that work sort of like Mad Libs – you enter your keyword, and the computer generates text, placing your keyword in appropriate places. You can even specify keyword density. And then you place these articles on your site.
If you experiment with generators a bit, you can place pretty high on the search engines. And this gets your page a lot of hits. But it’s every bit as obnoxious as the search engine spam was. When your customer gets to your website and it’s a lot of nonsense, they will assume that your product is worth about the same, and click right back to the search engine to take the next page in line.
Fresh Quality Content
Between search engines getting smarter and customers being picky about what faceless vendor they trust online, it may seem impossible to rank well. But the key is fresh quality content, sprinkled liberally with your keywords. You can write it yourself, hire someone to write it, download it for free, or purchase it in bulk from an article broker, but ultimately you need that quality content to maintain high rankings and keep customers happy.
The best way to do this is always to write it yourself. But not everyone has the time or the talent to do this. An option just barely second to writing it yourself, then, is purchasing it, pre-written and pre-optimized, for your site.
Why not download it for free? A couple of reasons, besides the usual “you get what you pay for.” While many free article sites do offer excellent quality, the authors of these articles don’t have your best interests in mind; after all, you’re not paying them. They are writing articles and posting them for themselves. Whenever you download a free article, you are required to place a resource box with the author’s name and website on your website along with the article.
What this does is drive your business to the other person’s website. How much business could you lose by doing this? And every customer you lose is not just today’s profit, but potentially tomorrow’s as well. Instead of setting this trap up for yourself, purchase your articles, purchase the rights to put your name on them instead of the original author’s name (or no name at all), and put them on your own website, no strings attached.
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.
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