Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Why Overlooking Article Relevancy Is A Big Mistake

By David McCammon

Your articles have to remain relevant to the main theme of your website. If they don't, you are going to lose visitor trust as well as search engine power.

What do we mean by relevant?

What we mean by "relevant" is "related to." Subjects that are related somehow in your article to your main business. For example if you were marketing a business start up kit, you would come up with a list of relevant topics that is interesting to humans and satisfy the search engines:

The pitfalls of starting a small business

Creating an advertising budget on a shoestring

Basic equipment business startups need

Creating an advertising budget on a shoestring

Creating an advertising budget on a shoestring

Good reasons to start a small business

How to get a startup loan

Of course, this is a partial list. A website on small businesses can generate a huge number of articles with relevant content.

So what if you sell something like dog treats?

With niche markets it may be significantly more difficult to determine what is relevant content. If your topic is a narrow one you can try to branch out the subject matter of your articles to include other things that may also be of interest to readers.

In the example above, you can assume that most of your visitors and potential customers own dogs. With that taken into consideration, there are plenty of topics you can write or purchase informative articles on that will interest visitors and help solidify your expert status. For instance:

Pet grooming tips

How to come up with a creative name for your new puppy

Shelters versus pet stores

Pet grooming tips

Whether dogs should wear sweaters

How to vacation with your dog

How to come up with a creative name for your new puppy

All of these topics are a natural extension of a core business: dogs and the owners who love them. They're all relevant to the website, and a mention of homemade dog treats could be included in each article without sounding blatant or awkward.

Finding relevant topics

If you're stuck for relevant subject areas, a keyword tool can help you generate more ideas. There are a number of free online keyword generators that can jumpstart your brainstorming process and reveal topics you might not have considered - 15359

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