Article Writing and Keyword Spamming

Writing articles for the Internet, whether as an effective method of bringing attention to your product or service, is quite different from writing articles for print publications like magazines or books.

In Internet writing, there are certain rules to follow, to ensure that the articles are well-written, and generate interest among web readers.

Internet Article Writing Purposes

Internet articles, whether for informative or marketing purposes, is distributed freely via the Worldwide Web. The main purpose is to generate targeted traffic to your website and construct, as well as maintain as list of potential customers.

The articles written are made to provide information to the reader and encourage them to learn further about your business or services. Internet marketing articles could be utilized to promote any type of product, service or specific information. They can be used to promote your website, affiliate marketing program or blog.

The process of writing Internet articles is relatively a simple one, and would generally cost you nothing. This involves writing the article and submitting these to article directories, article announcement lists, and e-magazines.

Internet Article Writing Methods And Techniques

Internet articles are written basically to entice the reader to learn more about the products or services you offer. The article itself is not where you sell the product, instead the article should provide web readers with adequate information, which would make them want o take action and click on your website to learn more. In addition, the articles should be really compelling, or persuasive, so that others would also want to post it on their blogs, websites or newsletters.

Standard Article Lengths

Internet articles generally should be between 400 to 1,200 words in length. It is important to keep the articles fairly within this length, because if it gets too long, the ones reading it may get really bored or begin to click away.

However, if the articles are too short on the other hand, it probably would not provide enough pertinent information. The main objective is to strike a balance between the two aspects. The title of an Internet article is also one of the most important aspects you should keep in mind.

An effective strategy would be to insert the keyword of your article into the title. In order to not compromise the quality of the title, web analysts suggest keeping an article’s title between 4 to 7 or 8 words.

How To Prevent Keyword Abuse

In writing your article, you may want to include the primary keyword or phrase, like around 1 to 3 times in each paragraph. Placing keywords needs to make sense, and you would not want overuse the keyword or phrase in a paragraph or sentence, just have it there. For example, you are writing an article on pet food. You may write the paragraph like this one:

“I regularly buy pet food for my cats. I really like the wide array of pet food choices they sell at Petco. They offer different pet food types for cats, dogs, hamsters, rabbits, parrots, and even iguanas”.

In viewing the example above, the keyword “pet food” was placed three times, and also blended well into the paragraph. The good thing is that the keyword wasn’t overused. In the succeeding example, you will notice that the main keyword is used excessively, and does not properly flow well, making the paragraph difficult to read:

“I regularly buy pet food for my cats. As much as I do, you’d also love the wide array of pet food they sell at Petco. They offer pet food for every type of animal. They have pet food for cats. They have pet food for dogs and rabbits. They also even have pet food for hamsters, parrots and even iguanas.”

Advantages of Internet and Classified Advertising

As an SME looking to gather more awareness for your business, advertising and branding is important. The advantages of internet advertising is extremely high. When people are searching for a service to benefit their lives, the 1st thing they would do is to use a search engine and look for the service closest to them. Its common to be earning 40,000% profit just by using online advertising for an offline business. Before we go into that, lets take a look at other forms of advertising.

1) Word of mouth

Free and Viral, when people start spreading the news of your service, you get free publicity.

2) News Editors

Contributing articles to your local news editor on topics which are hot. Editors are constantly looking for good articles or news for their readers. So if you can offer a product of service, something of value to the masses that is current and will garner readership, they will do a story on you.

3) Participating in groups and marketing your service to that particular group

Google Groups, Theme based forums such as golf. So if you’re a golf coach, head for the golf forums.

4) Traditional TV and Radio advertising

This is mainly for the bigger companies dealing in mass consumer products. Insurance, Food, Health products, Cosmetics.

5) Buying Ads in Magazines with tight themes

Examples include Fashion magazines, Body building magazines, car magazines.

6) Newspaper advertisements

Classified Ads are a common place to advertise. Other areas to advertise in are the money section where there are reports about how to make money through investing, insurance, money management etc. Many investors turned trainers like to advertise in these areas to a tight targeted audience.

7) Internet Advertising

Very simple and affordable for SMEs. 1st you’ll need to have a website that’s able to gather leads and even better be able to process sales. Just hire a web designer at elance.com. A good website would be able to convert customers or simply let them know how to find you. Instant traffic can then be generated simply by placing Ads on Search Engines such as Google. Many times for my own business, I like to generate instant traffic for quick returns, then followed by long term traffic generation strategies. Why? Simple, with Adwords, I can understand which keywords are converting and further SEO my site for these Buyer keywords.

Some specialists actually advertise their services using Adwords. I remember clicking on an ad which i know cost only $0.10 because it was extremely targeted and focused. The clinic charged me $400 for service. Best of all, the advertiser does not pay any advertising cost, until someone clicks on the Ad. which is why Search engine advertising is so profitable. Its costs pennies as compared to Magazine, Newspaper, TV advertising and yet the ROI is so incredibly high.

The advantages of internet advertising will greatly benefit your bottom line.

The Concept of Web 2.0 and SEM

Spending budget in SEM is worth so long as it attracts more unique visitors through search engines. Internet advertising in India is fast moving from flashy boxes and sponsored links to the new buzzword: search-engine marketing. In 2005, total online ad expenditures in India exceeded Rs4 billion ($88 million), of which Rs2.36 billion was SEM, out of which Rs720 million was spent by companies in India, and the rest from enterprises abroad.

According to an industry study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), Industry wide, the biggest SEM spenders are retail companies, followed by technology, travel and the automotive and banking industries, with non-governmental organizations and property markets also advertising.

Why Can’t We Ignore Spending on SEM?

Those who are into online business wanting to increase the web traffic through search engines should keep their eyes opened to study the trends. Otherwise, they’ll be lagging behind.

Furthermore, the old rules of web1.0 SEO hold less importance in the new web 2.0 world. In a fast changing behavior of search engines, the role of SEM consultant/SEO firm should be to keep a good track of the current trends and accordingly suggest the changes required to be implemented to drive more traffic.

Let’s have a look at the following table – I have drawn according to my level of understanding.

Web 1.0 SEO vs Web 2.0 SEO

Page views vs Accessibility

Reciprocal Links vs Bookmarking/del.cio.ous/dig/BLs

Keyword rich contents vs User generated contents/Interactivity

Meta tags vs description and Title/Optional

SE submission vs Optional

Directory submission vs Automatic crawling by spider

HTML optimization vs AJAX optimization

Reliability on Search engine PR vs P2P network

Personal sites vs Wikis/blogs

Double Click vs PPC

Digg is news search engines while delicious is a social book marking site and del.ciou.ous are news sites while techcrati is a search blog search engine

Technocrati

Blog search engines – rivals (Google, Yahoo! Msn!)

As of August 2006, Technorati indexes over 55 million weblogs
Technorati uses and contributes to open source software.

In gist, there are a few steps, such as, social networking, dig & delciou.ous, tagging, links from user generated contents, etc need to be taken. Moreover, we need to adopt search engine marketing mix to drive traffic not only through global search engines (google, msn, yahoo), but also through specialty search engines like it.com.

Google Can Now Read Flash Text and Index It

This article is for SEOs, Internet marketers, webmaster and site designers and all those who are interested in Search Engine Optimization.

For a long time now designer and developers used to stay away from flash because they were considered SEO unfriendly. SEOs had a bad time optimizing the flash files. The common trick used for this was the Google swf object a javascript package that used to manipulate a named div that already carried formatted text describing the flash content on a webpage. This was not only clumsy but it allowed keyword spamming too.

Now Google and Adobe got together and brought about a revolution in search engine crawling algorithms. Google search process can now read the text on your flash files. The flash files are now indexed like web pages. But make sure the text you are putting on the flash is flash text only. If you put an image that reads “apple” then no way the SE robot can read the text. So all information that you want to get cached must be in text. Images and movies in .flv format are still not indexed or understood by the SE bots.

As far as links are considered in the flash files or in other words the navigation from flash files they are done in the same way as done from the html pages. So even flash menus will not be a problem any more. I know its difficult to accept but its true folks. The things will now be easier. Hats off to Google.

All those who are using the swf object have nothing to worry. You may still continue to use the same code as Google says it will continue to support the code too that was used to fetch the flash file to manipulate the named Div as mentioned before.

So designers you have free hand form now onwards. Go ahead and so your creativity to the world. Flashy sites are now in.

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