Article Marketing to Search Engine Marketing

Article marketing is a relatively new means of achieving smooth traffic to a website in an indirect way. On the other hand, search engine marketing follows the straightforward approach of allowing the search engines to trap the websites based on certain criteria. Both search engine marketing and article marketing are found to be good practices for creating effective website traffic. However, there are a few shortcomings in each one.

Article Marketing - Pros

· You can build prospective one-way links to your website. Articles serve as a cause to direct potential visitors to a website. Anyone who is interested to read an article about a particular topic will find the links mentioned in it the most useful. Thus the articles help the website to invite more traffic towards it.

· The quality links contained in an article are search-engine friendly. They attract the search engine spiders mainly because of their attachment to the relevant content. Thus the page rank of your website increases with the help of these articles. There are article directories which host a collection of articles. Search engines easily catch the articles from these directories. It is, therefore, better to supply your articles to many article directories.

· Keyword-rich articles invite search engines towards them. However, the articles that contain excess keywords will be assumed as spam and will be ignored by them.

· Finally, articles help you to improve the reputation of your brand. Most of the users will find the articles useful to them before selecting a product. Therefore, by giving the relevant information to the customers through your articles, you gain more credibility from the customers.

Article submission has been found very effective because of their cost-effective nature. If you are able to identify the right content that describes your product or service and prepare the contents with the correct use of keywords, half of the job is done. As a next step, you will approach the article directories where you can post your articles free of cost, and they can be circulated to hundreds of other article directories after making necessary changes in the content in order to avoid duplication. In this way, articles help you to make your website content-rich in an indirect manner. Thus article marketing is cheaper than search engine marketing.

In order to achieve a proper SEO from the popular search engines such as Google or Yahoo! for your website, you have to invest a large amount of money for making your website SEO-friendly. If you wish to get better results from Search engine marketing, you have to accept many paid services such as the pay-per-click advertisements.

There are no many shortcomings for using article submission strategies for effective web marketing. However, we can say that article submission process is quite slow. It consumes a considerable amount of the author’s time. If they outsource the work, it would become quite expensive.

To conclude, we can say that article marketing is cheaper and effective if used wisely, but it gives slow results. Same is the case with organic search engine marketing. However, if you want immediate results, go for the paid search engine marketing services such as the pay-per-click advertisements.

Google Sandbox Explained and Solutions

The ’sandbox’ phenomenon is a mirage to a large number of web users. Does it really exist or not? Some webmasters are of the opinion that the page ranking of a website is decided by a set of mathematical algorithm and that it cannot be altered by an individual policy such as sandbox.

What is Sandbox?

Sandbox refers to a temporary cache in the search engine where the domains of the recently registered websites are saved. These domains do not show up in the search engine page result until a time is deemed when the search engines think that they can commence the ranking. It is the time when the websites picks up their ranking by using other methods such as external linking or any advertisement methods. This process of restricting the new websites from search engine pages is accepted in order to avoid the sudden ‘jump’ of the newer websites in the SERP. Usually the websites are kept within the sandbox for two to three months. However there are instances of not showing the websites for more than eight months.

The sandbox feature now explains the reason for your 0 page rank in the initial days of your website irrespective of its procurement of many reciprocal links. It is commonly noticed by the website owners that the page ranking starts from the lowest, almost nil, to a sudden 7 or 8 within a period of three months.

The ’sandbox’ concept has been the most debated by the search engine experts. Some of them accepts the existence of sandbox in search engine and attribute it as the reason for the low page ranking of the newer websites whereas the others are of the opinion that the low page rank is caused because of the natural delay caused by the Google search engines to interpret the credibility of the website before assigning it a page rank.

Another shocking information is that a well-established link may also be put in the custody of sand box if it is identified as a link farm. Many websites that have collected hundreds of links in a brief period of time have realized that their page rank dropped to the lowest all of a sudden and remained there for almost a year or so.

Now comes the most important question. Is there any solution to come out of this choking sand box? In reality, nothing. The only thing you can do is to wait. The hope that your website will show up in one fine morning with flying colors makes your waiting more meaningful. Meanwhile you can concentrate on other popular strategies such as Adwords for popularizing your website. Adwords help your website procure quality links from other sites. It will also find a proper place in the search engine pages of AOL, AskJeeves, Netscape, etc. As it earns more visibility, Google will release the website from the sandbox.

Do not get discouraged by the ’sandbox effect’. Apart from Google, there are Yahoo! and MSN as popular search engines where you can get a decent page ranking from the beginning itself. Keep working on your website. Improve its quality and update the contents focusing on the user side. Do not waste your time worrying about the ‘non-existing’ (?) sandbox.

Google Patent and the SEO

The Google Patent covers all the aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) in a comprehensive manner. Any website that wishes to be a part of the competitive virtual world needs to understand the important clauses covered in the Google Patent. Here is a brief coverage of the most important components involved in it.

The date of inception

Google prioritizes the websites on the basis of its date of inception in Google’s register. It may be the date when the website’s domain was registered with Google or the date when it was first caught by the Google spiders. The older the website, the more recognized it is.

Updates

Google differentiates the websites as ‘fresh’ and ’stale’. A fresh website is always preferred by Google. You can easily notice these facts by doing a research on your own. If you compare the contents of the websites in a Search Engine Result Page (SERP), you can very well notice that the pages are displayed in the order of freshness. Thus you will see the last updated page first and the stale pages at the bottom of the SERP. However, there are certain websites which are by nature ’stale’ and do not require any updates. Google does not penalize these websites for their static contents. Thus a website that describes the biography of prominent people is not likely to suffer like the one that caters the daily weather forecast.

Renewal

A site that applies for a regular renewal will get better ranking than a website that stays with the Google for a shorter period. According to Google, a website that requests renewal possesses quality content and thus is likely to remain for a longer period.

Change in the content

Google monitors the content of the website. If a website that is quite old suddenly changes its content to a totally new one, it will lose all the page ranking that it had achieved even if its domain names and links remain the same. Content is the most important component of a website, according to search engines.

Spamming

Google search engine ethics strictly prohibits any kind of spamming. This includes link farming, using alt texts and other hidden content and cloaking. Apart from discouraging these popular spamming methods, Google also monitors different spamming attempts and prevents them from time to time by the following activities.

· Monitoring the links that are already in the ‘black’ list.

· Monitoring the links that have got an unexpected search engine indexing.

· Monitoring the sites with duplicate contents

· Analyzing the link gain of the websites

Google Patent analyses the nature of the links that are associated with a website. Both inbound and outbound links are monitored, and there are more chances that the Google search engine labels your website as ’spammed’ because of the links that you exchanged with your partner. However, there are appropriate measures adopted by Google to segregate the appropriate links from those irrelevant links.

There are 63 clauses mentioned in the Google Patent. It is very essential that every Webmaster go through each of these and understand the essence of the clauses mentioned in order to improve the SEO of his website.

How to design a SEO-friendly website?

Website designing in today’s terms demands a meticulously created content in it. The role of a website designer cannot be merely restricted to attracting viewers with animated graphics and luring phrases; it also demands the inclusion of critical components necessary for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO-friendly websites should meet the following criteria.

Quality Content

The content includes the keyword/phrase, the text and the links. The keyword is the main component of the body of the website. The search engine spiders recognize the content of a website through these keywords. There should be a good number of keywords repeated in every page of your website. Care should be taken to include the keywords in the beginning of the paragraphs, especially in the first and last paragraphs.

Layout

A SEO-friendly website should have an appropriate layout to attract the search engines as well as the viewers. It is always better to keep all the navigation tools on the left hand side of the page, so that the search engine crawlers can segregate the inner contents and links from the navigation tools and identify them easily.

Sitemap

It is a good idea to include a sitemap or index for websites that have more than ten pages in it. Sitemap will guide the search engines appropriately to different segments of your website, even if it is crowed with contents.

Javascripts and Flash

Avoid using Javascript codes. These are not identified by the search engines. Similar is the case with Flash images. Try not to use them in your website. If they are very much necessary in your website, you may include them but don’t give those pages for search engine optimization. In situations where they have to be given for SEO, modify them by adding appropriate Meta tags and contents to them.

Frames and dynamic URLs

The search engine crawlers are hostile to frames and dynamic URLs. Avoid using them if possible in your website. However, in some websites, frames are found to be very essential. In such cases give them the ‘no frame’ tag in the frameset.

Tables

Just as the case with frames, tables also do not find much relevance in SEO. They are not recognized by the search engines. Why to create unnecessary blocks in your website if they are not helping the websites anyway?

Image

Everybody will accept the fact that images improve the quality of the website, except the SEO experts. Images not only delay the search process, but also pose as a hindrance to the effective traffic of the website. Moreover, a website with a lot of flash and other types of pictures and animations takes a long time to get downloaded, and so are likely to be ignored by the busy viewers. Add images only if they are very much essential and relevant to the contents of the website. In such cases, split the image into different sections and add keywords in them using alt tags appropriately. This will improve the SEO of your website.

To conclude, a website designing must be carried out in such a manner that it satisfies the demands of both the user and the search engine spiders. You cannot ignore either of them.