You heard writing articles is a great way to drive traffic to your site. So you have written several articles and posted them to dozens of article sites. Then you sit back and wait for the avalanche of traffic. And wait. Nothing is happening. What’s the deal?
The deal is depending on where your article gets republished your links may not be “live”. Writing articles and posting them is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Search engines love it and if done correctly it will help drive new visitors to your site and get you listed higher in the search engines. The problem comes when article writers and authors and publishers don’t all follow the same rules. The main problems are:
1. Original article not formatted correctly
2. Article copied and pasted into new webpage without links
3. New publisher doesn’t make links live
Lets start with #1 “Original article not formatted correctly”. Not all article sites are the same. On some sites you can simply put in plain text and it will format it correctly, paragraphs will be correct and it will recognize http://www.yoursite.com as a live link. Some sites you may need to format it all in html. Sometimes the easiest way to do that is type your article in a web design program such as “Dreamweaver” and then view the source and copy and paste the code. If you don’t have access to such a program then you should learn a few basic html tags:
View the source of this page to see the html tags.
This is a “break” tag, The break tag is used when you want to end a line, but don't want to start a new paragraph. The break tag forces a line break wherever you place it, a very common tag and one that is recognized by most all article sites.
Bold anything you want in bold should go between these tags
italic anything you want in italic should go between these tags
http://www.yoursite.com--some sites will recognize this as a live link. Many will not! This is where you are going to lose your links! If your article is copied and pasted into another web page or ezine your link will not be clickable. Someone who really wants to go to your webpage can copy and paste it into their browser but it is alot easier if someone can just click on it! If it is not a clickable live link search engines will not follow it not matter how many times it is republished. Imangine your article being reprinted 1000 times, a potential of 1000 back links to your site but without it being a clickable link you won’t reap the benefits of those 1000 links. Your links to your sites should always be formatted this way:
