EzSEO Newsletter # 31
Andy Williams ez SEO
ezseonews.com
Hi again
This week we will go back to our mini-series on using articles to improve your site PR, link reputation & rankings. First however, I want to re-print an e-mail I received this week since it looks at one of the topics we mentioned briefly last week - the Google Sandbox.
This week:
1. Google Sandbox revisited
2. What to do with finished articles
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1. Google Sandbox revisited
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Last week I wrote briefly about something that has become known as the Google Sandbox effect.
Colin Healy who reads this newsletter wrote to me about his own experiences with the Google Sandbox effect. With his permission, I have re-printed his e-mail here as is provides first hand experience of this phenomenon.
"Hi Andy
Some thoughts on the Google 'Sandbox'.
First, the name. I think the idea is that Google is putting all new domains into a children's sandbox so they can play amongst themselves without annoying the 'adult' established websites.
Time frame. In my experience the sandbox is a real phenomenon and it lasts much longer than a couple of months. I started building websites seriously about 7 months ago. The first ones I published started getting Google hits after about a month. A couple of weeks later they vanished. They remained effectively dead until about a month ago when they started getting traffic again.
My focus for the last 7 months has been on building sites so I have a platoon of websites emerging, or waiting to emerge, from the sandbox.
Of course, this may have been due to a deliberate policy or a glitch, and Google can change policy or correct glitches (or introduce new ones!) on a daily basis...
It may have been an experiment they think better of and ditch... Who knows? Colin"
Thanks Colin. Great advise that mirrors my own advise - keep building and don't get dragged into forums to speculate on what might happen. Keep adding content to your sites and let Google do its thing. Valuable content will always be value added on the Internet, and as such, will be around for many years to come. Talking about content, let's get back to our article mini-series that we took a break from last week.
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2. What to do with finished articles
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OK, you have finished your first article. What do you do with it next?
I would recommend doing two things:
* Publish the article on your own web site
* Submit the article to article submission services
We will look at the first point here, and then next week continue with the second point.
Publishing your article on your own web site is easy to do. Here is an overview of the steps involved that you can use for reference:
a) Create a template that matches you site design for the articles you intend to publish.
The great thing about using a template for creating your article pages is that you can use the same template for each article you add to your site. This speeds up the process of adding articles to your site and also provides a uniform appearance which makes your site look more professional.
If you have not used templates before, don't worry. Just take a page from our main site e.g. the index page. Save it as template.html (or whatever you want to call it). Delete all content on the template.html file that you do not want appearing on all of your article pages. You should be left with a blank page that has the look and feel of your main site. That is your template finished - easy isn't it?
b) Insert the article into the template
Now your template is ready, copy the article you wrote into the template. You may have some hyperlinks in your article that need to be added, so do that now. Also you need to add a header tag at the start of the article to include a descriptive title for the article. Try to get your main keyword phrase into the header. If you are using someone elses article, make sure you include the resource box with an active hyperlink to the author's site.
c) Add a title tag and meta tags to the articles
The page is now looking like an article page. To keep the search engines happy, you should write a title tag for the HTML document and at least a meta description tag. I would recommend getting keyword phrases into both the title and meta description. I would not recommend using the same text in the article header, title tag and meta description. The HTML title tag can be similar or even identical to the article header, but make sure the meta description is different. I would use the meta description to get in a couple of secondary keywords that were not used in the HTML title tag or article header tag..
d) Link from your new article to relevant pages on your site
One of the points of these article pages you are writing is to bring in more traffic which can be funneled to your main sales pages. Since the articles are written on a topic that is related to your site, you should have a couple of obvious pages that your article should link to. If your whole site is tightly focused on a niche, you might even want to include a menu to your main sales pages on each article page.
Any links to other pages should include the main keyword of the page you are linking to in the link text. In addition, it helps if that main keyword is also found in the title tag of the article itself, and possibly in the article too. This all sounds complicated, but if you write articles with sales pages in mind, this should all be fairly natural. Let's look at an example to explain how this would work:
Imagine a sales page on your site selling LCD monitors. You could write reviews on 10 different LCD monitors (you don't need to own these to write a review - collate the information on other people's sites and write a review based on other people's experiences). Now, when you link to your main LCD monitors sales page, you will find that you naturally include the main keyword "LCD monitors" in the article title tag, article page (including header) and the link text to your main sales page. This tightly focused group of article pages will increase the link reputation and PR of your main sales page on LCD monitors making it rank higher in the search engines.
Another place you might like to link to from your article pages is related articles. Just bear in mind that the more links per article page, the less PR each receiving page will receive from these links.
e) Save the article
OK, nearly finished. Save your article page using a keyword phrase related to the article. If you want to use a multi-word phrase I suggest using a hyphen to separate the words. Just try not to make the filenames to long.
f) Link to the article from a page within your site - article maps
OK, the article page is finished and you can upload it to your server. However, without a link pointing to the article it will never be found and wont help your site rank well or make more money. You need to place a link to the article from a page on your site already in the search engines. This can be the homepage, a related page, or the sitemap. The problem with linking from the homepage is that you should be adding articles on a regular basis and all of these extra links on the homepage will soon become a problem. The homepage is better used to link strategically to the most important money making pages of your site. That way the homepage will give bigger PR boosts to the pages that make you the most money.
What you might consider doing is to create an "article map". This is the same as a sitemap, but only includes links to your article pages. You can then link to your article map from the homepage to ensure that all articles get indexed as quickly as possible. I personally like to link to the article map from the sitemap page (my sitemap includes links to all other pages in my site).
I use my own Sitemap Creator software to create article maps (as well as more general site maps) for my own sites. When I add new articles to my site, it is just a case of pressing a couple of buttons and my new article is included in the map and uploaded to my server making sure it is visible next time the spiders do their rounds. Read more about Sitemap Creator
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For those users of my SEO Website Builder, the above steps involved in adding articles to your site is fully automated. You type (or paste) in the articles, SEO WSB creates the article pages and article map and even automatically adds a link to your article map from the sitemap. If you want to see an article map, visit my own SEO WSB site promoting Jim Edwards Turn Words Into Traffic eBook.
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OK, that is all there is to adding articles to your site.
Next week we will look at how to explode your traffic by submitting articles to article submission sites.
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