The Challenge Day 2

I left things yesterday with looking for content for this blog and that’s where I hit problems. I visited my article directory and looked in the Free Tools and Resources category and had a bit of a wake up call.

You see when I started my article directory in July 2007 to get the ball rolling I added a script that would import articles from another company. The next day 47,000 appeared and brought massive problems with them.

Many articles had been submitted to the wrong categories, new categories had been formed which duplicated some of the categories already there, for instance Mortgage and Mortgages, links were stripped from author bios and there were many crap articles that I wouldn’t have accepted.

The script got fixed for link stripping but it didn’t solve the other problems so I stopped using it after a week and just took articles that were manually submitted. I spent a lot of time putting things right but you always miss something.

Last night when I visited the Free Tools and Resources section I found that most of the articles in there were out of category, even one about buying coffins for goodness sake. When I found a suitable article for this blog I discovered that the link was dead. I then checked that authors account and he has over 500 articles on the directory and of the 20 or so articles that I checked all of the links were dead.

Not a good sign for somebody who is offering advice about Internet marketing. Something could have happened in his personal life to end his business, or he just might not have made it as an Internet marketer.  Either is possible but if it’s the latter it indicates just how tough it is to make it in a home business internet or otherwise.

Dead links leave directory owners with a quandary. We know that a lot of dead links might affect a websites status in the search engines so we need to deal with them. Three choices:

1. Find an active link of that author and replace the dead links with it.

2. Delete all of the articles

3. Replace the links with your own active links or those of a charity.

Usually I go for option 1 and then option 2 if I can’t find an active link for that author. I would feel as if it was cheating to go for option 3, though a link to a charity might be a good idea.

Adding Content

Now that I’ve sorted out the article directory and added a few posts from there I’m going to add some of my own fresh content to this blog. The search engines like unique content so I always intersperse my own content amongst other peoples articles.

I make sure that there are some good keywords in the titles and articles but not so many that it doesn’t make sense. I also add my keywords as tags to give my articles a search engine boost.

Thoughts About This Theme

I really like this theme and although currently I haven’t made many of my own changes I can see that it’s easy to do. When I write a new page and publish it the page automatically gets a link at the top of the page. On my other blogs I have to add those links with html.

I did try to add categories for the recommended website links but so far I haven’t managed that, but I’ll figure it out sooner or later.

Hello World

After writing some content I then decided to sort out my Google sitemap. Sitemaps are cool in that they make it easier for the search engines to find and index your web pages. I made my sitemap by easily adding a plugin to the blog and once I had set it up the sitemap notified Google and some other search engines that the blog was up and running. I was then able to indicate how often that I wanted Google to crawl different aspects of this blog.

You might be wondering why I attach so much importance to content, keywords, tags, sitemaps and search engines so I’ll try to explain. If you think of a new website as a shop, but the shop has nothing in the window, no signs and no advertising has been done, then unless somebody stumbles upon it by accident then it won’t have any customers.

The same applies to a website or blog so you need to signal to the search engines that you are up and running and keep them happy enough to send traffic your way.

After submitting the sitemap I placed an advert on a free advertising blog and then checked my other websites and blogs to see if they were linking to this blog. If not I will place a link and instantly have some backlinks.

During the rest of the evening I will be checking free Wordpress widgets and plug ins to see if there is anything that might be useful to me.

Tagged with: article directory • articles • content • free advertising blog • free articles • free tools and resources • Google • sitemaps • Traffic

Filed under: A Challenge

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