| 8 Sources To Research Awesome Article Topics |
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Tuesday, January 1, 2008
But article marketers and new article writers are often stumped for topics to write about. Finding topics that appeal to your readers can be time-consuming but well worth the effort. Here are no less than eight awesome ways to research your market and find newsy topics that attract loads of traffic and the interest of your target audience. 1. Keyword Research Tools To write an article that will get you a significant amount of traffic, you need to write about topics that people are searching for. You also want to know which terms your target audience uses while searching, so you can use them in your article title and copy and increase the chance of being found by search engines. Two excellent keyword research tools you should always use to research article topics are Wordtracker and Overture's Keyword Inventory Tool. http://www.wordtracker.com http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ 2. Newsletters and Trade Journals Subscribe to email newsletters, ezines and offline publications related to your topic of interest. Reading what others in your field are writing about will give you lots of ideas for your own article topics. It's easy to find newsletters that cover your topic online. If you want to write about internet marketing, for instance, you could search for "internet marketing newsletter" and find the most well-read and respected publications in that field. 3. Google News Alerts Google News Alerts is like a news aggregator that allows you to receive news based on your keyword of choice. http://www.google.com/alerts When you subscribe, you'll receive the latest stories that carry your keyword. Go through them and you may find some gems of information that you can write up into a topical article based on that story. 4. Press Release Alerts Press releases are an excellent way to find out more about new discoveries or advances in your field. These can make an excellent topic for an opinion piece about that discovery or development. Search press release sites for the latest releases in the field of your choice. You'll find a bunch of them listed here. http://www.onlineprindia.com/press-release-distribution.htm 5. Online Forums You can get some of your best article topics from other professionals in your field. Online forums provide an abundance of opinions, queries and ideas that might just make that flashbulb go off in your brain. Visit forums, lurk and read other's posts or participate in discussions and benefit from the minds of some of the most interactive people in your field. 6. Blogs Blogs are a hotbed of discussion and opinion. They often carry some very interesting and topical pieces that can help you ideate. Blog directories, a long list of which can be found at the link below, are a good place to start looking for blogs written on your topic of interest. http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ 7. Seminars and Conferences One of the best ways to keep up with new ideas and developments in your field is to attend seminars or conferences and network with other people. You can often come away with a bunch of ideas, at these gatherings, and use them to write up articles. 8. Spy On The Competition Check out your competitor's business and websites. They may be using ideas or even making mistakes that could give you ideas for articles on what does or doesn't work. And finally, always remember to give credit (and a link back) to the news sources that you cite in your article. _______________________________________________ Priya Shah is a partner in the search engine optimization firm, SEO & More and writes an online marketing blog. Visit Article Writing Tips for more article marketing tips and tools. This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked. _______________________________________________ Are you interested in increasing your Google PageRank? You should be. If you have never heard of Google PageRank and you have established a website, it is high time you learned about Google PageRank and what it means to you and the success of your website. Having an excellent Google PageRank can either make or break a website in terms of overall success. Let's take a look at what Google PageRank is and why it is so important to every website owner. First, a word about the Google Search engine: Google is one of the most popular search engines on the Internet. Not only is Google's search engine the absolute largest of its kind, the company focuses on making web information easy to access and even easier to find. Google has designed a unique system and the search engine has yet to be surpassed in terms of the information it provides. Google has grown immensely since its early beginning in 1996 and it will continue to be a predominant force on the Internet. Furthermore, because Google offers easy access to immediate information, they own one of the top Internet search engines in the world. Thus, it would serve a webmaster well to become familiar with the Google PageRank process-the Google PageRank is an algorithm that is based on inbound links and other factors and will ultimately determine the location of listing of your website in the Google Search Engine. What precisely is Google PageRank? Google PageRank is a process the search engine's uses as a way of selecting sites to answer specific queries. Basically, when an Internet user submits a query, the Google search engine will attempt to match websites to the query that has been posed. Yet, there is a bit more to this simple science than the act of submitting a query suggests. Rather, behind the scenes, Google uses specific algorithms to determine if a site specifically address a web user's needs by analyzing the content of a site by keyword and by the number of inbound links associated with the site-every inbound link is viewed as a vote and the more votes one has, in conjunction with the more keywords one has, the higher their Google PageRank is. Why is Your Google PageRank Significant? What does it mean to you when your Google PageRank is increased? Does it really matter what your Google PageRank is at all? You bet it does-the higher your Google PageRank is the higher on a search engine's listing your website will appear. Thus, if you are looking for top billing, especially in a search engine as popular as the one Google offers, you will definitely want to maximize your efforts of getting your website visible and improving your PageRank is the best way to accomplish such a task. Moreover, the higher you appear on the search engine listing offered by Google, or many other search engines, the easier your website is to find. Essentially this equates to more web traffic for your website and if you are running an online business, more web traffic ultimately means more profit for you. Making Google PageRank Improvements If you are looking to improve your Google PageRank you can do so by starting a link campaign. A link campaign can help you increase more inbound links to your website and in turn, more inbound links will increase your Google PageRank. How do you start a link campaign? Well, you can go the hard route by scouring the Internet to find websites similar to your own. Or, you can make your link campaign a far easier process by using the services afforded to you by PageRank Browser and locate all of the best, themed websites on the Internet with relative ease. Of course, there are few things you must bear in mind when you begin your link campaign. Google actually rates various links and holds some links higher than others. In other words, if you link to 100 less than popular sites you may increase your Google PageRank. Conversely, if you link to 50 extremely popular sites and you get inbound links in return, you may significantly increase your Google PageRank because the most popular sites on the Internet are linking directly too you. Thus, when you begin your link campaign, keep this popularity issue in the back of your mind. Further, know that in using PageRank Browser, you will be able to locate the popular sites with ease, and thereby significantly increase your Google PageRank. About Inbound Links Quite frankly, some links that you will establish will be better than others. You goal will be to establish the best links possible by examining the quality of inbound links. Various webmaster tools can help you determine the quality of the reciprocal links you establish. You will want to work hard at establishing direct inbound links to your site-direct links from already popular websites. You will also need to establish links to websites that are similar to yours-remember the search engine algorithm used by Google to determine your page rank is based on relevance. You will also find that the location of inbound links is of significant importance. For example, when you establish inbound links, those links that are buried deep within a website will have less influence on the ranking of your website in Google's search engine. What is clear is that your Google PageRank is of significant importance. Thus, every effort should be used to improve your Google PageRank-with the use of webmaster tools and the use of sites like PageRank Browser you should have little difficulty getting your PageRank right where it should be. Therefore, you will not only improve your PageRank you will improve the web traffic you receive by leaps and bounds. Moreover, your improved PageRank will make you a force on the Internet to be reckoned with-you will have a highly recognizable website for all your efforts and you will ultimately improve your online business' bottom line. Using External Coding to Improve Search Engine Placement Do you have lots of JavaScript coding in the header section of your web pages? Do you re-list your CSS styles at the top of every page? Do you have JavaScript coding spread throughout your web pages? If you answered yes to any of these questions your site may be driving away search engine spiders and losing search engine position ranking. As you can imagine search engine spiders have a lot of pages to get through on the web when they are indexing sites. To improve their speed and efficiency search engines program their spiders to give up easily if they have problems with a page or if they have to wade through too much code to find the relevant content. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to put your keywords as close to the top of the page as possible. This way the search bot will see the keywords before giving up and moving on to the next page. But what do you do if you have lots of JavaScript code or CSS styles pushing your keywords down the page in your coding? You need to find a way to cut down on all that code that gets in the way of the search engines properly indexing your page. We do this by moving the JavaScript and CSS styles off the page and into external files. This is a fairly easy and straight forward process and can have the added benefit of making your pages load faster as well, which the search engines also like. In many ways CSS styles and JavaScript work in a similar fashion. You set up functions in a script or formatting in a style sheet section, and then refer to that section in your html code. For instance if you have a JavaScript that displays a clock on your page you would have the JavaScript functions for the clock listed in your head section, then you would simply call that function from the place on the page where the clock would be displayed. Similarly with CSS you set up your styles ahead of time in a Styles section of the page head, then you simply refer to the styles as needed in your html coding. One benefit of this is that it cuts down dramatically on the amount of formatting code needed when compared to using Font tags. If you want to use the same JavaScript or CSS styles on a different page you could copy all that code onto the new page. But this would cause two distinct problems, first you would be adding a lot of code to each page and second if you wanted to make a change to the JavaScript or CSS styles you would need to do so on every page that the code had been copied onto. Both of these problems can be solved simply by using external files. You create one external file for your CSS and another file for your JavaScript. These could be named mysite.css for the CSS and mysite.js for the JavaScript. These files can be created in any plain text editor or html code editor, they are nothing more than files that contain most of the CSS or JavaScript code from the web pages. With JavaScript you have an opening JavaScript tag, then a comment tag, then assorted functions and what not, followed by a closing comment tag and a closing JavaScript tag. Your external file would start with the opening comment tag, contain all the functions and such, and end with the closing comment tag. You would leave both the opening and closing JavaScript tags in the html page. If you have more than one JavaScript on the page you can move all the code into one external js file. Simply copy it into the file in the same order as it exists in the JavaScript tags on the html page. You will only need the one pair of opening and closing comment tags. Once your JavaScript is moved off the page you will need to tell the web page where to find it. This is done in the JavaScript tag that was left on the page in the head section. Right now this will be an opening JavaScript tag placed right up against the closing JavaScript tag, with no additional code in between. You will place the reference to the external JavaScript code inside the opening JavaScript tag like this: script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript" src="mysite.js" Placing CSS styles in an external file is handled in exactly the same manner. Move the styles into the external file, and then refer to that external file with your style tag in the head section of the web page like this: link href="mysite.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" An added benefit of moving the code into external files is that you can then change the styles of your whole site simply by changing the code in the one external file. Once you have moved the code into external files you will have greatly simplified the code on each page. This will take you a long way towards making your pages lean and mean, and very search engine friendly. You can find sample external files for this article on my web site at: www.howtogurus.com/free-articles.html ================================================================ George Peirson is a successful Entrepreneur, Internet Trainer and author of over 30 multimedia based tutorial training titles. Read more articles by George Peirson at http://www.howtogurus.com/free-articles.html Article copyright 2005 George Peirson ================================================================ |
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