My blog post today is related to a topic I normally do not write about – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and website traffic.
Those who visit HotelDealsRevealed.com regularly will know that over the past 8 months, this site had grown significantly in terms of site features and content. The Priceline and Hotwire forum has also grown to nearly 600 members who have contribued nearly 1400 new posts.
One of the ways in which website owners promote their site is by writing articles and publishing them on ‘ezine’ or article websites. This helps new websites in 3 main ways:
- Traffic: Most people who write articles are website owners and tend to write articles that related to their site. They will reference their site in the article, hoping that readers will visit their website after reading the article. In my case, I write articles about Priceline, Hotwire, and general travel, and usually reference HotelDealsRevealed.com in the article.
- Back Links: Back links are when other websites link to your site. This is very important for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google will rank your site higher if there are lots of other websites linking to your site. The goal of most web site owners is to have a high ranking in Google. Being placed first, second or third in search results will have a huge impact on traffic to your site. Back links help your search engine ranking significantly.
- Article Syndication: Most authors want their articles to be read and therefore allow their articles to be reused by other other websites. If you write a good article, it may get picked up by and posted other websites, generating even more traffic to your site and further improving your SEO.
Several months ago, I started writing articles and publishing them on 9 different article websites. I had read about how publishing articles can help promote a website but I wanted to know first hand if this was working, and if so, what sites were helpful and which were not. The table below provides a summary:
|
Site Name
|
Google Links
|
Traffic Generated
|
Google PageRank
|
Alexa Rank
|
| EzineArticles.com |
9 |
246 |
6 |
131
|
| ArticlesBase.com |
15 |
170 |
6 |
392
|
| Thefreelibrary.com |
6 |
145 |
7 |
3,099
|
| ArticlesFactory.com |
10 |
110 |
4 |
12,783
|
| Articlesnatch.com |
22 |
45 |
5 |
1,836
|
| Sooperarticles.com |
11 |
34 |
5 |
5,974
|
| ArticleAlley.com |
5 |
13 |
5 |
2,750
|
| GoArticles.com |
4 |
10 |
4 |
1,823
|
| A1Articles.com |
1 |
2 |
5 |
6,738
|
Google Links: This is the number of links that Google found on the article website to HotelDealsRevealed.com. Remember, this is important because it helps improve where HotelDealsRevealed.com places in search results.
Traffic Generated: This indicates how many readers visited HotelDealsRevealed.com after reading one of my published articles.
Google PageRank: Google PageRank is an indication of how popular a website is. PageRanks range from o to 10, with 10 being the highest rating possible . New websites will have a rank of ‘0′.
Alexa Rank: Alexa.com is a website that ranks other websites based on popularity as well. With Alexa, lower rankings are better. E.g., if you are ranked #1, you are the #1 most popular website in the world.
Both Google PageRank and Alexa Rank are proxies for website popularity. They are important for SEO because Google and other search engines value back links more if they come from higher ranking websites.
You can see from the table above that not all article websites are created equal. I submitted the same articles to all of them and yet the amount of traffic generated ranges quite significantly. The top 4 traffic generating sites being: ezinearticles.com (246 visits), articlesbase.com (170 visits), thefreelibrary.com (145 visits), and articlesfactory (110 visits). In terms of traffic, this really is not a significant amount of traffic but clearly these 4 sites stand out above the rest.
In terms of back links that were recognized by Google, there was quite a variance here as well. Articlesnatch.com and sooperarticles.com were two website that only generated a moderate amount of traffic but generated 22 and 11 back links (as identified by Google).
Three website were a complete bust: articlealley.com, goarticles.com, and a1articles.com. These sites neither generated a meaningful amount of links to HotelDealsRevealed.com, nor generated any traffic. This does not necessarily mean that other authors should not submit their articles to these sites. There are many factors that could have lead to the poor experience that I had. For example, I write travel articles. These sites may not cater to travellers or travel articles may not be prominent on their website.
Overall, writing travel articles to promote my website has been beneficial. I will continue to write articles and publish them on the top 6 article sites in the table above.
