Article Surfing Archive

A crucial part of getting your web site noticed by the search engines is having lots of fresh keyword-rich text content on your site. Fortunately, there are many efficient and affordable ways to add new content to your site. Here are just a few of them.

Hire a Ghostwriter

Hiring a ghostwriter to produce text content for your site will obviously incur costs that you won't have with free articles. However, with a paid ghostwriter, you can expect a higher level of quality in the writing, and also specify which keywords you would like to appear in an article. By publishing free articles on your site, you will be adding content that appears on dozens of other websites. With a ghostwriter, however, you can be sure that the content will be unique to your site, which something else search engines consider when ranking a site. Ghostwriters can be found by registering at www.elance.com or www.directfreelance.com and posting a simple project outline. Writers will bid on your project, and you accept the writer with the qualifications and bid that best suits you. If you go to the trouble of hiring a ghostwriter, it is probably a good idea to get them to research and write a number of articles, rather than just one.

Keep a Blog

If you maintain a blog to give your site visitors news and information about updates to your site, it is important that you publish your blog on the same server as your site. Blogger.com　is a free blogging service that allows you to host your blog on your site rather easily. You simply need to go through the 'Advanced' set up when creating your blog and enter the ftp information for your site's server. If you already maintain a blog that is NOT hosted on your own site, you are wasting a valuable resource for SEO, as search engines do not recognize that keyword-rich content as part of your site. You should check the help section of your blogging service to learn how to republish it as part of your site.

As with an article archive, it is important to link to your blog from the main page of your site, or at least from one of the upper level pages, so search engines can easily find and spider your blog.

Many webmasters don't maintain a blog, simply because they do not know what to include in them. If you start an article archive as suggested above, you can use your blog to announce new articles. Rather then making a short post such as 'go check out the new articles in our archive,' include the article titles and the first line or two of text of each article with 'read more'' or 'continued'' linking to the full text in the article section. These is a simple trick for getting some of your keywords to appear in two place on your site.

Create a Forum on Your Site

A forum or bulletin board on your site will appeal to both search engines and human users. Search engines like forums because they are constantly being updated with fresh content. Human visitors will often return to sites with forums to ask questions, seek or give advice, or to make contact with other people with similar interests. As with keeping a blog, it is possible to maintain a forum either off or on your site's server, and it is very important that it appears on your server, with links to and from your main page. Again, this is so important as this is the only way that search engines can recognize all of that content as part of your site. Setting up a forum does require some technical skill, but it is not as difficult as you might think. PhpBB () offers free forum software with templates and set-up tutorials.

If you would like to add a forum to your site, but lack the technical skills, you can easily outsource the work through www.elance.com.