How to Use Articles

When you use articles as pages, don't just paste them there as they are. Search engines will "see" the same article in ten places, and they tend to discount the value of "duplicate content." Of course you can't alter the author's article - not even by one word. What you can do, though, is have more than just the article on that web page. If there is enough unique writing added, the page will not be "substantially duplicate content."

Also, many writers do not properly optimize their articles, which means you might not get traffic to them from the search engines. But by adding a bit of your own content, you can be sure that the page is properly optimized for whatever keyword you are targeting.

There are easy ways to accomplish both these goals when using other author's articles, including:

1. Add a Page Title

You cannot alter the title of the article, but you can title the page any way you want. This is an opportunity to use the proper keyword if it isn't in the title of the article. For example, an author might have an article that is decent for the keyword "reduce credit card debt," but maybe he chose to title it "Digging Yourself Out Of The Hole." You can title the page, "How To Reduce Credit Card Debt," and have his article title further down.

2. Add an Introduction

This can be a short paragraph - or more if you have more to say. There are two purposes for this. First, to get the right keyword in there again for optimization purposes. Second, you may want to add enough content to have the page seen as "unique" by search engines.

Suppose you are optimizing the page for the keyword, "money making hobbies," and you have an article that is about that topic, but the title is "Make Money Doing What You Like." Furthermore, there is only one use of the complete keyword "money making hobbies" in the article. What do you do?

You can title the page "Money Making Hobbies," and write a short introduction telling the reader how much they'll like the "money making hobbies" in this article. You have the keyword in a headline now, and in the text of the page. This will make it easier for the search engines to find when people search that term.

You could also point out what you like about the article, or what you disagree with (be polite - you are using the author's article for free). You might also suggest that readers pay particular attention to some tip or part of the article. Another good way to "beef up" the page is to start with a couple paragraphs that tell your own related true story ("I once made thirty wooden chairs..."). A story is great way to introduce a "how to" or informational article.

3. Add a Summary or Comments

After the article you can comment on it, or summarize it. Again, this is an opportunity to introduce keywords that may be under-represented in the article. It is also another way to add more unique writing to the page to avoid the "duplicate content" designation.

Note: Be sure that the keywords you optimize for are relevant to the page - "keyword spamming" is not only frowned upon by search engines, but it is just plain rude to "fool" people into visiting a page they have no interest in.

4. Add Links to Other Pages

Suppose you have a website about gardening, and you use an article on "How To Make Natural Insecticides." After the article, you can write, "Here are some other pages that may be of interest to you," and have several links, with or without descriptions of what those pages are about.

Put this after the author's resource box, to be fair. Also, try to make the pages you link to as relevant as possible. If you had a page on how to use insecticides, for example, this would be useful to the reader and even help with optimizing the page.

You don't have to use all of these "tricks" to have a well-optimized and unique-content page. Just use the ones that seem most appropriate for that article. You'll probably at least link to other, related pages on your site that the reader would like to know about. Using these techniques, I regularly get website traffic from search engines, directly to pages that are built around other people's articles.

Problems When You Use Articles From Other Authors

I use articles from other authors much less often now than I used to. There are some problems with the strategy, but fortunately there are ways to overcome these problems too. Here is what you need to know.

Continues here... Free Content for Websites

Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters on the home page.

Writing Tips
Sell E-Books
Writing for Money
Writing an Article
Get Paid to Blog
How to Write Articles
Article Writing Software
How to Write Articles

Generate Even More Free Website Traffic

When you use articles written by others, you are hoping that they will be found in search engine results. To make this more likely, you should link to these new pages from other places on your website. The more links you have coming into a page, the more important search engines consider it - and this includes links from your own pages.

You may want to have a "new pages" section on your homepage, where these new additions are linked to for a month or two. At least link to the new page from your site map, and link to that from your homepage. This puts the page just two "clicks" away from home, which makes it easier for search engine "spiders" to find it.