At Article Cache, our mission is to be one of the premier article directories on the internet. To promote this mission, our authors and potential authors should understanding how our directory fits into an overall search engine optimizaiton strategy for their website. Our experience from running multiple highly successful websites has shown there are five essential elements to focus on to improve your search engine rankings. Sorry for the length of the article, but read on to learn more about these elements and how Article Cache can help.

Content is King: - If you have done any research on search engine optimization, you realize the importance of the content of your web pages.  Your content must be optimized for the search engines and have optimal usage of your most important relevant keywords and keyword phrases. There is a delicate balance between keyword richness and user friendliness.  If you focus only on keyword richness, your site will not be very user friendly which will hurt sales and conversions.  If you focus on user friendliness, it may not be optimize properly for the search engines resulting in lower search engine rankings.  In our opinion, it is more important to focus on writing user friendly and appealing content.  This will promote sales and conversion when visitors come.  Focusing primarily on keyword richness may bring traffic but users will be turned off by the content resulting in lower sales or conversions.  Traffic is little value if it doesn’t appeal to users who have grown accustomed to hitting the back button on their browser faster than a Ferrari on the autobahn.  As noted earlier, the key is balance.  As you write user friendly content a secondary goal should be to optimize the pages with phrases that best match your overall theme.  The search engines like this.  You can then focus on link popularity and link quality to help drive traffic.  We will cover both in a moment.

Keyword Optimization – By optimizing your pages with the phrases that best match the overall theme of your site, it will improve the likelihood that users will find your site when searching for content like yours. You should target short multi-word phrases unless your keywords are unique.  First, find your optimum keywords and determine their popularity. Second, ensure your title tag is relevant and keyword-rich. Put your most important keyword phrase up front in the title.  Lastly, use your optimum phrases in your title, h1 through h6 tags, meta description, meta keywords, and body text, link URLs, text, and title attributes.  Be careful not to keyword “stuff” these tags, use the phrases sparingly; don’t repeat them within each tag.  

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Link Popularity – To increase your search engine rankings, you must increase your link popularity. Link popularity generally refers to the number of links on the internet that point back to your website. If you are on a budget, link popularity can generally be increased primarily in two ways.  The first method is by exchanging links with other sites with similar content.  We're not going to cover that here because most website owners are familiar with link exchanging. The second method is writing articles that relate to your site, including a link to your site in the article and then getting the article published on as many article directory sites as possible.  Employing both strategies is the most effective; however, the latter is especially effective because it creates multiple one-way links back to your site. 

Article Submission - This is where Article Cache can help. Many webmasters search feverously for good site content (see "Content is King " above) because they either lack the writing skills or inspiration to develop the content themselves. Webmasters with available funds hire ghost writers. Those without funds often look to article directories to obtain some of their content. Articles within directories such as Article Cache are copyrighted in a manner that allows other website owners to re-publishable the articles on their website. However, they must give credit to the copyright owner (author) of the material and leave all hyper links entact.

This demand for content by other webmasters creates an opportunity for you to promote your site. Writing articles that relate to your content and promoting those articles on the Article Cache directory overtime establishes you as an expert in the field and places your link on the other webmasters site. Think of the potential here. You are getting a one-way link from every site that posts your article. Of course, you will want to publish your articles within as many article directories as you can. Article Submitter Pro can help automate this process. If you are not taking advantage of this strategy, you are missing out on a tremendous amount of free advertising. 

 
Link Quality – Bear in mind, link popularity is not only a matter of quantity; the quality of those links is important too.There are two components to link quality. First, sites that are pointing to your website should have related content. A link from a site that is unrelated will benefit your site, but only marginally compared to a link from another site with related content.  The second component to link quality is the actual words in the link back to your site. The key here is to ensure the links pointing back to your website include your most relevant keywords in the link title.  Ideally, you want hundreds of links from other sites using a variety of link title phrases.  These link title phrases should be your optimum keywords.  Research keyword phrases and focus on phrases that are not too popular.  They should also relate to your topics or products. If too popular, it will be difficult to obtain top rankings.  For example, rather than targeting "widgets" you should focus on phrases such as "blue widgets", "unique widgets", "unique blue widgets", "quality widgets" and "decorative widgets". 

Effective search engine optimization requires a combination of these essential elements.  Highly optimizing your website content and achieving high link popularity/quality for your relevant keywords will absolutely improve your search engine rankings over time. Of course, the effort you put in will determine the results you get out. You can successfully improve your search engine rankings if you spend the time required to properly write optimized website content and establish good link popularity/quality.