Having lots of fresh keyword-rich text content on your site is a crucial part of getting your web site noticed by the search engines. Fortunately, there are many efficient and affordable ways to add new content to your site.

Hire a Ghostwriter

Hiring a ghostwriter to produce text content for your site will obviously incur costs that you won't have with free articles. However, with a paid ghostwriter, you can expect a higher level of quality in the writing, and also specify which keywords you would like to appear in an article. By publishing free articles on your site, you will be adding content that appears on dozens of other websites. With a ghostwriter, however, you can be sure that the content will be unique to your site, which something else search engines consider when ranking a site. Ghostwriters can be found by registering at www.elance.com or www.directfreelance.com and posting a simple project outline. Writers will bid on your project, and you accept the writer with the qualifications and bid that best suits you. If you go to the trouble of hiring a ghostwriter, it is probably a good idea to get them to research and write a number of articles, rather than just one.

Keep a Blog

If you maintain a blog to give your site visitors news and information about updates to your site, it is important that you publish your blog on the same server as your site. Blogger.com　is a free blogging service that allows you to host your blog on your site rather easily. You simply need to go through the “Advanced” set up when creating your blog and enter the ftp information for your site's server. If you already maintain a blog that is NOT hosted on your own site, you are wasting a valuable resource for SEO, as search engines do not recognize that keyword-rich content as part of your site. You should check the help section of your blogging service to learn how to republish it as part of your site.

As with an article archive, it is important to link to your blog from the main page of your site, or at least from one of the upper level pages, so search engines can easily find and spider your blog.

Many webmasters don't maintain a blog, simply because they do not know what to include in them. If you start an article archive as suggested above, you can use your blog to announce new articles. Rather then making a short post such as “go check out the new articles in our archive,” include the article titles and the first line or two of text of each article with “read more…” or “continued…” linking to the full text in the article section. These is a simple trick for getting some of your keywords to appear in two place on your site.

Create a Forum on Your Site

A forum or bulletin board on your site will appeal to both search engines and human users. Search engines like forums because they are constantly being updated with fresh content. Human visitors will often return to sites with forums to ask questions, seek or give advice, or to make contact with other people with similar interests. As with keeping a blog, it is possible to maintain a forum either off or on your site's server, and it is very important that it appears on your server, with links to and from your main page. Again, this is so important as this is the only way that search engines can recognize all of that content as part of your site. Setting up a forum does require some technical skill, but it is not as difficult as you might think. PhpBB () offers free forum software with templates and set-up tutorials.


Lots of quality content is the key to lots of traffic. What does this mean and why is it so?

This also means that they are not looking to buy. It then follows in most cases that if they click through to a site that is obviously trying to make a sale they are unlikely to stay on that site.

So how do you provide visitors to your site with the sort of content they're looking for? Firstly you need to find out the sort of questions that your target market is asking. Once you know those sort of questions you can set about finding the answers either yourself or paying someone to do it for you.

It is worthwhile at this point to check that you actually know your target market well because if you don't know what you're aiming at then how are you going to hit the target? You should also be careful not to target too broad a market because then you will have a lot of competition, potentially limiting your ability to make money. Do some keyword research (a good place to start is http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) to help you find out if you should narrow your target market.

How can you find out the sort of questions your target market is looking to find answers for? There are several ways you can do this. One of the easiest ways is to spend time in user forums specific to your target market. In those forums you can easily read the sort of questions people are asking.

If the answers are readily available (web, library etc) then you can simply reproduce those answers (being careful not to infringe copyrights) on your site. If the answers are hard to find then this signals a great opportunity for you to get the answers, possibly even a potential product you could create!

Another way to research your target market is to set up a survey on your site and do some targeted advertising requesting people to help you with some market research. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how many people who are struggling to find answers will be willing to do this. It is best to be upfront about your intentions for collecting the market research. Why not just tell them that you are going to answer their questions once you've determined the issues that are of the most importance to the target audience. The reward for those who are generous enough to fill out your survey is they will be glad for the new content you provide and you could even give them a free copy of your new product if you create one. If you do have a product this also gives you a potential source for obtaining the all important testimonials you need for your sales copy when you officially launch it.

An alternative way to research your target market is to try and do a joint venture with someone who already has an established audience in a similar niche/topic. Of course if you do it this way you need to be very careful that you frame it such a way that it is a win-win for you both. Also you need to ensure that you don't give them the opportunity to steal your product idea before you have formally made any binding arrangements. If you are able to negotiate through these initial hurdles then you will have the captive audience that you can ask questions of.

So once you have clearly identified the target market and established through careful research (not by guesswork) what sort of content they would appreciate you are then ready to go ahead and create that content! This is easy to do even if you're not a writer and will be the subject of my next article.


How to go about sourcing content for your sites.

Well the most obvious but also the most time consuming way to do this is to write the content yourself, although it's not nearly as hard as it sounds. Do you realize that if you read 3 entire books on one subject you've pretty much set yourself up as an expert? By doing this chances are that you will know more than 99% of the population, of course there will be some people out there who are extremely well educated on your subject (or niche) who have spent years studying it, you can't hope to compete with them but don't let those few stop you getting started.

If you don't have the time or patience for that then there's always the internet to turn to for research. Spend several hours carefully and selectively reading up on your chosen niche, keeping bookmarks and taking notes and you'll be surprised at how much you'll know by the end of it. Remember that it is OK to use bits and pieces of other people's work as long as you don't copy large tracts of their work verbatim. You can always use a tool such as http://www.copyscape.com to check if your written work has likely infringed someone else's copy right, if it has then just go back and make changes and keep checking until your work is sufficiently unique.

A way that many people source their content is through the free article directories. The terms of service vary for each of the article directories so you need to check them before using them to ensure you comply. Basically you are allowed to reuse the content on your own sites provided that you do not alter the articles and leave all the links intact, including the resource box for the author. This is a good and perfectly legitimate way to build good quality content, however you would do well to mix up the free articles with some content sourced from other places to help your site be unique and different to other sites. After all with the number of internet marketers around these days who knows how many people populate their sites with mostly free articles. Although nobody knows for sure how the Google duplicate content filter works you are well advised to not rely solely on the article directories as this will also provide a richer experience for your site visitors.

If you're really serious about providing a "content rich" website and don't want to do the writing yourself then there are 2 main ways that you can buy articles suitable for the niche(s) you've chosen. The first and generally less expensive way (at least on a per article basis) is to join a Private Label Rights article membership site. There are quite a few of these and there is a great deal of variation amongst them. The general principle is that you pay a monthly membership fee, usually in the vicinity of $20-$50 a month and you'll get supplied with perhaps 50-200 articles a month. You are entitled to do anything you like with these articles, from using them exactly as is to rewriting as much or as little as you want. Also these membership sites usually restrict the number of members that can be a part of it at any one time. These membership restrictions can be quite low, less than a hundred to several hundred, so you need to be careful about exactly what you're paying for!

. Usually the price is a trade-off between more-exclusive/more-expensive and less-exclusive/less-expensive. Remember the more memberships available from the site the more people are out there trying to compete with you with the same content. Of course you can rework the content either manually or with the aid of software and thus try and keep your content unique that way.

The final way that you can source content for your site is to pay someone to write exclusively for you. This way you have more control and can guarantee that your content is unique. A common price you can expect to pay is around $5 per 500-1000 word article, however if you want quite a few articles you may be able to negotiate a lower rate with a writer. Some good sites for finding a writer are:

* guru.com - http://www.guru.com

* rent a coder - http://www.rentacoder.com

* eLance - http://www.elance.com

Be careful to check out the credentials of each writer that gives you a quote. Also be aware that guru.com and rent a coder give you the option of escrow payments giving you a greater level of safety in terms of not paying when the writer does not deliver what you wanted.


Add a dynamic content

You should add dynamic content to your website because when done well it will ultimately provide visitors to your site with a richer and more enjoyable experience. So what exactly is dynamic content? Well firstly you need to understand what a static page is. It is simply a page that does not change whenever somebody views it, that is every time the page is viewed the content will be exactly the same, unless of course you go and take some action to manually update it yourself.

A dynamic site has some or all of it's pages put together in such a way that each time a visitor views those pages they will get at least some different content to the last time they viewed it. This can be done in several different ways and I will go through a few of them so that you get an idea of how it's done.

The first, most obvious and probably the most common way to do this is to add an RSS Feed (or more than 1) to the pages you want to have dynamic content. Just to confuse you there are 2 different ways to do this. You can use Javascript or PHP code to publish your chosen RSS Feed(s) in a human readable form. To the human visitor these 2 methods will be indistinguishable and will achieve the same result, that is the display of fresh, constantly updating content on the chosen pages. However when it comes to the all important search engine spiders and robots that index your pages there is a very important difference. Search engine spiders and robots do not read Javascript or interpret it, they basically just skip over it, so it doesn't matter what the code does (or doesn't do), every time your pages are visited by a search engine the Javascript will not affect the evaluation of your content. However when a search engine visits a page with PHP code, the PHP code gets executed and the search engine only gets to "see" the result of the PHP code, i.e. the search engine doesn't even know there is PHP code there, it just gets content that is generated by the PHP code.

Now what this means is that pages that contain dynamic content by way of PHP code will result in the search engines assessing your pages as having consistently fresh content. Being assessed as having fresh content is extremely valuable and will result in your site achieving a higher ranking. For you see the search engines love fresh content, and are not so fond of sites that never appear to change, even if they do by way of Javascript. If you're reasonable at software programming you could write the PHP code that will expand the RSS Feeds yourself. Alternatively you can download some free software that will do it for you from http://www.rssfetchlive.com/ - MSIFetch or http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/ - Carp.

Another slightly more complex way to add dynamic content to your pages also involves using PHP code. What you can do is to setup a single file that contains different "blocks" of content. You then need to add PHP code to your pages that will randomly select one of the blocks from the file you setup and display it on your page(s). You could expand this idea further by setting up several files with content blocks and writing PHP code that will select from as many as the files you have setup as is appropriate for each of your pages. As with the RSS Feeds you now have dynamic content on your pages that human visitors will see and very importantly the search engines will recognise your content as "fresh". How to setup these files and write the PHP code is beyond the scope of this article.

The other main way to add dynamic content is to get your visitors to do it for you, again there are several different ways to do this. The easiest and probably most common way of doing this is to allow your visitors to post comments on your site ala blog style, although you will need to make a management decision about moderating the comments. Not moderating requires no work but you then run the risk of inappropriate comments being posted on your site, moderating could become very time consuming. You can setup a free article directory such as http://www.articledashboard.com/download.htm - Article Dashboard which will allow users to post articles directly to your site, this can result in a steady stream of content if you get enough patronage. You can also do things such as run a poll, making sure you keep a dynamic display that shows your visitors the current poll results (to keep them coming back to check the latest).