Two Strategic Tactics in Using Articles to Build Web Traffic

by Chris Le Roy

Everyone in the SEO industry is singing the praises of articles and using articles to build traffic to their website. However there are in fact two tactics you can use in creating articles to get you qualified traffic. One of the biggest issues that we have as website developers is the threat of duplicate webpages and being penalized for duplicate web content.

Essentially the problem with articles is that articles do in fact violate the search engine rules for duplicate data and the process of simply writing one article and submitting it to a few thousand article directories really does run the gauntlet with the search engines. Whilst to this point the search engines do not appear to have adjusted their algorithms regarding articles, I am sure that will happen in the future.

So you need to have a very clear strategy on how you are using articles in your traffic building strategies. Lets face it, you like me do not want to read the same material over and over again on the internet so when I am working with my clients we actually develop really careful strategies on how we are going to use articles and what the articles use is going to be.

When we write articles at our center we do it for two reasons -

1. Write Articles to Build Qualified Incoming Traffic
2. Write Articles to Build Incoming Links

The best sort of links that will help influence your website traffic, are what are known as natural links. That is links where people link to you simply because they believe in what you have to offer. Articles provide a natural source of incoming links but there is a danger.

In the future it is possible that Google, Yahoo or MSN may look at the pages where your incoming links are sitting and compare the information on those pages with others that contain incoming links to look for duplicate content. If any of the search engines ever do look at this then many of the bigger players overnight could loose their positions overnight simply because they have too many similar content pages on the Internet.

It is really important that you develop a very clear article strategy that involves building articles that help develop incoming links as well as writing articles that are specifically designed to bring in qualified traffic.

Tactic One - Use the Articles to Build Qualified Traffic

One of the steps I follow when we first start building an article strategy for our clients is to get them to write five unique articles and then submit them to the article directories. We wait for a number of weeks and then use the search engines to identify who actually picked them up. Quite often you will find that most of those that have been picked up are simply from the article directories. What you also want to do at this time is to look at your traffic logs on your website.

What you are looking for is those websites that are sending to you qualified web traffic without going through the search engines. That is, the people are reading the articles and then coming directly to your website. The websites that give you this sort of traffic are your most important clients because often what you will find is that the ratio of visitors to sales is very high because they have read your article, believe what you are saying and then decide to buy.