Google’s Farmer Update Kicked My Site Off the Search Engine

When it comes to internet marketing, I’m pretty well versed in the different tactics you can use to increase website visibility and generate traffic. Several years ago, in fact, I had a website where I wrote about internet marketing, web design, and article writing. Even though this is an erotic fiction story site, you can find many of these articles in my archives from when I moved them from the original sites.

Anyway, everyone is up in arms about the Google Farmer update which was supposed to address the problem of spammy content and content farms. I didn’t think anything of it because all of the content on my blog is original even if it is a few years old. But if Google’s update managed to deindex popular sites like the Cult of Mac, then I should not have been surprised to find that this blog no longer ranks for my name Daria Black.

Making the Most of Your Article Marketing

Okay, we already talked about why article marketing should only play a small part in your marketing efforts and I’ve given a few alternate suggestions for better and more effective ways of building traffic and back links to your site. If you still are hardcore about including article marketing as apart of your total marketing effort, here are a few tips to reap the most from your efforts:

1. Make sure they’ve been around for awhile. Not only do these directories tend to have a higher PageRank but they are usually well known on the webernet and thus attract the people more likely to reuse your content.

2. Pick the ones that screen submissions. Directories that accept anything will only drag down the value of your articles.

Get More Website Traffic Than You Can Handle

It used to be so easy to get free website traffic to your blog. All you had to do was fill out a few meta tags and made sure you used relevant keywords in your content. Now everyone is on the internet trying to make money, get their message out, or just plain connect to other people with like interests and the competition for attention has gotten fierce. Getting free targeted traffic to your website is a lot more challenging.

But with consistent action and these seven tips, you can drive traffic to your website without having to spend money on hit or miss advertising.

1. Increase Website Traffic by Getting Involved

Get involved in the internet via forums, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs. This accomplishes several things. First of all you are meeting people and making contacts. By helping out on a forum in your niche, you are increasing the perception of you as an expert and because most forums and blogs allow you to link to your website, you are also improving your search rankings with back links and getting targeted website traffic from both the sites and the search engines.

Article Marketing: Is It Worth the Effort?

Article marketing is the act of writing short, between 500 to a 1000 word, articles and distributing them to other website owners to republish on their site for free. This form of advertisement is not new. In the offline world, business owners would write articles regarding an aspect of their industry and submit them to newspapers for free in exchange for having their business contact information printed with the article.

Internet marketers were quick to port this marketing tactic to the virtual world, spawning an entire industry complete with specialized software and tutorials. Every five minutes, it seems, an article directory is popping up touting the same benefits of submitting your work to them.