From time to time Ezine Articles emails out hints and tips on various article writing topics. Recently they gave some advice on how to write keyword-rich article titles.
Take for example an article on car audio. “Car Audio” as a title is too short: the reader does not know what aspect of car audio your article is about and the search engines are unlikely to categorize it so that searchers for websites in your sub-niche are able to find it.
Using, say, ”Car Audio and Electronics” is better, but it still does not explain why a reader should read the article.
“Car Audio and Video That Will Make Your Friends Envy You” gives you another key word and a reason why someone should read the article, but it is still far too general for the search engines.
Which brings us to ”Car Audio Components, Subwoofers and Tweeters – 7 Tips to Amp Up Your Stereo”. Here you have multiple high value keywords, you have given a quite compelling reason to read the article and have even managed to make use of a keyword, “Amp”, as a verb. This is good.
In general, you should ensure that the first 3 words of the article title introduce the topic of the article and don’t start your title with words such as “a” or “the”.
You are aiming for a title that appeals both to a reader – they want a title that tells them what the benefit will be if they invest the time to read your article – and to the search engines – you need them to find a keyword-rich title highly relevant to your niche.
You may have noticed that some Google AdSense ads have changed. Google has changed the format of three of the popular ad units:
- Leaderboard (728×90): the title, description, and URL are now arranged in rows instead of columns (except when only one ad is showing)
- Medium rectangle (300×250): the URL is now in the same line as the title
- Large rectangle (336×280): the URL is now in the same line as the title
The aim of the changes is, apparently, to make the ads more space-efficient and visually pleasing.
New Google AdSense ads formats
In certain cases, there will also be a few minor adjustments to the font size. For example, the font size for the leaderboard with four ads is much more readable.
According to Google, during testing, the redesigned ads performed extremely well. The changes will roll out over the next few weeks.
My AdSense returns have improved recently; whether this is anything to do with the new formats I don’t know.
Ezine Articles has three levels of free membership: Basic; Basic Plus; and Platinum. When you sign up you are a Basic member. As you submit articles your account may be reviewed and upgraded. The key advantage of becoming a Platinum member is that articles by Platinum members are reviewed in priority to those by other free members.
As a Basic member you have to submit ten articles and have them accepted before your account is reviewed for an upgrade. The factors that the reviewer is looking for when considering an upgrade are:
- How closely you have followed Ezine Article’s editorial guidelines
- The quality of your content
- The quality of your English
- How many changes to your articles have been required by Ezine Articles editors
If your first ten articles have been accepted with no significant issues then your membership may be upgraded to Platinum straightaway; if there have been some issues your account may be upgraded to Basic Plus, after which you have to submit a further 25 articles and have them accepted before your account is reviewed again.
The most common reasons for articles being rejected initially and thus giving rise to account upgrade problems are:
- Content copied from elsewhere
- Blatant self-promotion
- Grammar and spelling errors
- Articles that don’t deliver on their title
- Non-compliance with Ezine Article’s links rules
- Formatting issues
Assuming that you want to become a Platinum member as quickly as possible you should avoid all these issues and make sure that your first ten articles are good ones.
Domain Samurai is a free tool from the makers of Market Samurai. Its purpose is to take the drudgery out of selecting a domain name for a new project.
Domain Samurai takes seed keywords provided by you – it also contains the same keyword research module used in Market Samurai so you can do keyword research – and then using preset or custom prefixes and suffixes comes up with a list of available domain names. You can specify whether you wish to search for domain names with hyphens or not and also which domain types you wish to search for, so if you are only interested in .com it will not bother looking at others.
You can rank the results of Domain Samurai’s search by ‘keyword density’ to help you find the domain name with the best potential for search engine optimization. Of course, the actual domain name that you choose will depend on a number of factors including the branding potential, the search engine optimization potential and the strength of competition in the market place.
Domain Samurai also includes links to a limited number of domain name registrars, but you can just use your usual domain name registrar if you prefer.
What Domain Samurai does is not “rocket science” but it does save a significant amount of time. For more information and to download this great free tool visit the Domain Samurai website.
There is a great deal of mis-information on the internet about how to publish something on Ezine Articles. Something that you see quite a lot on Internet Marketing forums is a statement that says something along the lines of “when you write an article it must be published at Ezine Articles before it appears anywhere else on the internet otherwise it will be rejected”. This is not true.
When you send an article to Ezine Articles for publication they carry out an internet search for the same or substantially similar content online. I don’t know what search tool they use but it seems to be quite good. If they find a match they try to find out whether the article belongs to you. This is done simply by looking at the author name; if it matches you are OK. If the author name does not match or there is no author name on the existing material your article will be rejected and your account may be suspended.
This is the advice that I obtained from Ezine Articles:
“The article can be published elsewhere, however, we verify exclusive
rights for articles based on the author name associated with the
article. If the article is found listed under different names on
different sites (or no name is cited), the content is considered
non-exclusive and cannot be accepted as such.
I suggest adding your author name to the found article, and to other
articles appearing elsewhere. If you can do this, we can get the
article reviewed for you. If not, it will have to be removed for
being non-exclusive.”
So if you wish to publish an article on Ezine Articles and that article has already been published elsewhere, make sure that the name on the existing article matches your Ezine Articles author name. Do this and all will be fine. I have tested it and it works.
WordPress 3.0.1 has been released to deal with approximately 50 minor issues. See the WordPress 3.0.1 release announcement for more information.
The popularity of WordPress appears to be growing. According to the WordPress 3.0.1 release announcement, nearly 11,000,000 copies of WordPress 3.0 have been downloaded in the 42 days since its release.
When you write an article as part of your article marketing you need to make sure that you get your resource box right.
The resource box is the place that you are allowed some self-promotion so you need to make the most of it. Typically, you are allowed two self-promoting links in your resource box – you may not be allowed any in the article itself, depending on the article directory you are submitting to.
Your resource box will normally contain some brief information about yourself and a couple of links to other web sites you are promoting. It needs, however, to be something that will cause readers of your article to want to click on one of the links.
I have a couple of “standard” resource boxes that I use. If necessary I change them to suit a particular article. An example of one of my “standard” resource boxes is:
Clive manages ‘Marazion Guide’, your online guide to the ancient charter town of Marazion, situated on the shore of Mount’s Bay in the far west of Cornwall in the United Kingdom. As well as being one of the most popular holiday destinations in the United Kingdom, Marazion is the “gateway” to the world famous St Michael’s Mount. To read more about Cornwall and, in particular, Marazion and St. Michael’s Mount visit Marazion Guide.
Of course, this resource box works only for people interested in Marazion, St. Michael’s Mount or Cornwall, but the general principle applies to many, but not all, topics.
A slightly more aggressive example can be built in three parts.
Part 1 – Remind the reader of the pain and suffering that they are going through because of their failure with, for example, Internet Marketing. I don’t bother with numbers at this stage but you could, for example, by asking if their time is worth more than 28 cents an hour. I would write something like: “Sick and tired of being an Internet Marketing failure?”
Part 2 – Give them a URL to go to. “Visit my site at: http://www.clive-publishing.com/”
Part 3 – Give them a super benefit from going there. “and learn how to earn as much as $274 a day”. This is where you need to put cold hard numbers in front of them, but make sure that your promise is realistic.
Overall, the aim is to make your resource box compelling.
Experiment with your resource boxes – get them wrong and your article marketing is not as effective as it could be – get them right and you profit.
Ezine Articles is regarded by many as the “premier” article directory and it is well worth the effort (at the time of writing, Ezine Articles has a Google Page Rank of 6 and does not use “nofollow” tags on your links) to get your articles accepted there.
However, Ezine Article’s rules are stricter than many of the other article directories and you need to follow them completely to have your articles accepted. Follow the following guidelines and you should be fine:
1. Use a relevant title – it may not contain your name or a link.
2. Write a two to five sentence summary of your article, not exceeding 200 words.
3. Your article body should be original and informative and between 400 and 750 words in length. It should be in English, using proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure.
4. Do not use too much bold or italic text.
5. Do not include more than a couple of lines of quoted text.
6. Place your copyright statement at the end of the article.
7. Do not include any links in the first three paragraphs.
8. Do not include more than one link to one of your own websites in the article itself.
9. Write a relevant resource box containing one or two links (limit it to one if you included a link in the article itself) to one of your own websites.Do not include the same link twice.
10. Avoid subjects likely to breach Ezine Article’s rules.
Today, the MY Skat has been anchored in Mount’s Bay south-west of St Michael’s Mount. Skat is a 70 metre luxury motor yacht owned by Charles Simonyi, co-founder of Intentional Software Corporation and former software engineer at Microsoft. Skat was built by Lürssen of Bremen, Germany and launched in 2001.
MY Skat in Mount's Bay
The following information about Skat is courtesy of Wikipedia:
General specifications
- Construction: Lürssen Werft, Bremen, Germany, 2002
- Home Port: Georgetown, Cayman Islands
- Length: 70.70m / 233′
- Width: 13.5m / 44.3′
- Draft: 3.7m / 12.1′
- Displacement: 1636 metric tonne
- Hull: Steel hull, aluminum superstructure
- Engines: 2 × 2000 kW / 2682 hp MTU gas turbine
- Cruising Speed: 15 knots
- Max speed: 17 knots
- One engine operation: 13 knots
- Fuel: 210.000 liter (55,000 gallons)
- Water: 56.000 liter (14,793 gallons)
- Guests: 10
- Crew: 16
- Designer: Espen Oeino
- Interior designer: Marco Zanini
- Stylist: Espen Oeino
Features
- Elevator serving all four decks
- Leisure platform with Jacuzzi
- A gymnasium located centrally under the mast
- Helipad on the upper aft deck servicing a helicopter painted in colours matching the yacht.
- Observation platform with helm control halfway up the central mast.
- Two tenders
- Two Jet Skis
- Motorcycles and accompanying lift
The yacht can achieve a speed of 13 knots on just one engine. A cooling pump integrated into the gearboxes assures safe operation on one engine by pumping oil through the idle gearbox. The shaft of the idle engine can be disengaged, leaving the idle propeller and shaft to freewheel.
You may have heard the term “article marketing”.
Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles that they make available for distribution and publication by others. Each article contains a ’resource box’ that include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business’ credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.
Article marketing has been around for years but Internet Marketing has taken it to a new level.
Internet article marketing uses online article directories, such as Ezine Articles. Internet Marketers write articles and submit them to the article directories. Anyone can then read the article and, if they wish, reproduce it on their own website. The authoring business benefits in two ways: first from the reproduced content; and second from the links contained in the article and its resource box.
The better online article directories are considered authority sites by search engines with the result that they receive a high volume of traffic much of which is passed on to popular articles.
I will explain how to use article marketing in a future post.
