Dec 09 2008
Using Articles to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
When businesses make the choice to keep a blog - or to hire a ghost writer who can blog for them - to drive traffic to their web sites are going to find that there are other tools available to them as well. In addition to SEO techniques that will help get sites noticed by the search engine spiders and blog posts, submitting articles to directories can be an effective tool for generating web traffic.
If you are thinking about article marketing as a way to drive traffic to your blog or web site, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:
- If you are going to use a post on your blog as an article, be sure to post it to your blog first. Simply put, someone’s going to get hit with a duplicate content penalty by the search engines and if it’s your content, it shouldn’t be you.
- The most effective articles are longer than blog posts. You can get away with a blog post that’s 100-200 words long; articles should be at least 400 words to get your message out; 500-700 word articles tend to be able to give the best balance of information and length.
- Choose your keywords or key phrases well. Just as it’s not a great idea to tag every blog post that you write on a Tuesday with the tag “Tuesday,” you are going to want to focus on writing articles that appeal to a relevant keyword or key phrase.
- Avoid overuse of your keyword or key phrase. There’s a balance to everything really; going overboard with your keywords or key phrases is going to detract from your message.
Great advice, especially #1! That is often overlooked.
I would think writing separate content for articles and blog posts would be a better idea. Why take the chance.
It’s definitely a better idea to create separate content and to shake things up that way, but at the same point in time, there are folks who are looking for shortcuts - they deserve a bit of advice too, don’t you think?