Using Articles Wisely

By Author: Jon Murray
Total Articles: 23
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Did you know that you can get free, fresh, quality content for your website? I'm not talking about "stealing" content from other sites. There are sites out there, known as "article directories" who want you to take their content and post it on their web site. Is there a catch? Of course there is, but I can show you in this article how to minimize the downside and maximize the upside so that you can use this free content and make your traffic soar.

The typical way that a publisher (web master) uses content from an article directory is to go to their prospective article and click on the "Ezine Ready" link. This will give you the option of a text or HTML version of the article, then they post the content in their blog. The article sits, in it's entirety on one page of the blog. This technique works just fine, but if we refine it a bit, you will see better results.

First let's talk about some options in your blog engine (Wordpress, Serendipity, Drupal) they all have these options, but they may be called something different. These options are "category" and "extended body". Using these options can have a major ...
... effect on how well you're article directory content works for you.

The category blog option is pretty self explanatory, it lets you divide your blog up into relevant sections. A sports blog could be split up by sport for example. Football, baseball, hockey could all be different categories, then when you make posts to your blog, you assign each post to a category. This much you already know, but have you thought about the implications to search engines?

The extended body option in your blog allows you to split up long posts. It essentially allows you to put a "summary" right up front, then the reader needs to click "continue reading" to read the rest of the article. Why in the world would they do this? Well, it's sort of a throw back to the old style in newspapers and magazines. You know, where they have ten stories on the front page, but only part of the stories. To continue reading you need to flip deeper into the newspaper. This allowed newspapers to have more headlines visible to the reader, more headlines equals more readers. So, now you know about the extended body, but have you thought about the implications to search engines?

What are these search engine implications I keep talking about? Well, consider how the search engine sees your web site. It sees it in pages, not articles. So what pages do the search engines see for your typical sports blog. There is the main page, one page for each category and each full article itself is a page. So if you don't use categories, you don't have the category page, if you don't use extended text, you have two full copies of the article on your site, the main page version and the full article version.

Now, consider this set up. Split your site up into categories (football, baseball, hockey) and only display the first paragraph or two of any given article, using the extended body for the rest. Now let's look at your site.

You have a front page consisting of summaries from ten or so unrelated articles (well, mostly unrelated), but since the author resource box for articles is at the end, there are no links out from your main page (yay)! The category page now becomes the same summaries, but only for one category. This way, it is more focused, more targeted and more keyword rich, again since you are using extended body there are no outbound links on this page (yay)! Then there is your full article page. The entire article, including the author resource box is on this page. This is the only spot on your site where the full article exists, so you won't suffer a duplication penalty and even if the same article exists on one hundred other sites, you still have unique content on your main page and category page (because they are a mix of different articles), so Google or other search engines will see these pages as entirely unique content.

I guess the question you need to ask yourself is whether or not this technique is morally correct. I look at it this way, the author of the article wants exposure and links back to his/her site. If the article is good, then your user will click on the "continue reading" link and read the entire article including the author resource box. The author still gets the links to his/her site, your site gets unique content and doesn't suffer massive page rank bleeding, everybody wins.