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 centre 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.

By using this strategy we then contact those websites that are sending us the traffic and offer to write articles that are unique for them in return for a natural incoming link for each article. Most websites will take this opportunity with open arms and for some of my clients this process has been incredibly lucrative.

The other reason these companies also choose to use the articles my clients write, is that we tend to write articles which are more focused on certain keywords. This helps the associate website with their search engine placement. We will often talk to the associate sites to find out which keywords they want for their articles and discuss their actual search engine traffic.

One of the other elements my team and customers also do is that we very rarely put the same article we provide to these clients on our own sites. In these cases what we do is to customize or rewrite the articles so that they cover a similar topic but are presented in a different form.

This leads me to our second tactic ?

Tactic Two ? Use the Articles To Build Back Links To Build Indirect Traffic

The second tactic is to simply write articles that everyone can use. The key to this tactic is to ensure that you use the author bio area with a lot of caution. Ensure that every article includes a minimum of two, preferably three incoming links to your website.

One of the issues every website owner needs to address is building incoming links not just to the main webpages or home page but more so to other webpages in your actual website. In fact you want to customize all of your pages to be incoming pages with their own keywords.

What we do at this point in time is to actually write the articles that go onto the website. They are customized and optimized for the appropriate keywords and then include the links, with the keywords in the hypertext of our distributed articles in the author bio section. This helps ensure that the search engines will look at the incoming links more favourably as the incoming links relate to pages that are being linked to.

This second tactic is different to the first tactic, as this one is about ranking you well in the search engines. In this case the path of traffic is ?

Search Engine >>> Customised Article >>> Sales Page

Using this tactic to help build your websites, natural links do two things. The first element is that the more incoming natural links you get, the better you will rank in the search engines. Number two, the customized article will help prove to your customers that you know what you are talking about and this of course builds rapport. In fact what most advanced SEO strategists will do is to tell you to capture your visitors email addresses on the Customised Article. This also helps you to maintain contact.

Look the bottom line is this, articles are a fantastic and natural way to build your credibility with your visitors as well as natural incoming links however you do need to be very careful and have a very clear strategy as to what you want your articles to do. Too often people simply use hit and miss tactics for article development and in the long run this simply will not give you the outcomes you want.