March 9, 2007 17:02
Category: Writing
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Content forms an important of on-page optimization for increased search engine visibility. There are several well-meaning essays from renowned seo practitioners, who suggest nothing beats lots of good amount of content article as an essential part of optimization strategy.
Content writers like me who earn their bread writing for others' websites know that keyword-rich targeted content is like long-distance runner. Having large quantity of content as an ongoing effort is akin to opening many windows to your home (read 'website') so as to let in abundant light and air (read 'web visitors').
No doubt there are highly rewarding short-term measures to promote websites, for example PPC ads and press release. In fact there are many proponents of PPC ads and suchlike, who run their business on the promise that they can make any web venture earning money within 60 days flat.
Interestingly, even they need good content article for the 'landing pages' so that the onrush of viewers, coming as they do from PPC ads, can be transformed into willing customers.
My guess is that such initiatives have limited shelf life if only for the reason that they can be easily cloned by sharp-eyed competition, of which there is no dearth on the web.
Okay, if content article is so important for a serious-minded website, the moot point is where to get seemingly endless source of them to sustain in the long run.
It's here that you need assistance that will stand by you through thick and thin. For, howsoever authoritative you're in you subject, a time is bound to come at some point when you're no longer able to spin new contents on your own.
If that is so, and I believe it is, whom do you turn to for help? Here then are some resources that will undoubtedly be of assistance in such cases.
Wikipedia
It's my all time favorite. Some time back I wrote a blog content article about Wikipedia. It's mammoth and perhaps there's no topic there you can't find something about. What clinches Wikipedia as my first preference is that all you find there is updated and made current by expert volunteers across globe.
Archive.Org
Internet Archive, better referred as 'Archive.org', stores an amazing variety of web content and has a staggering 85 billion pages in its arsenal many of which are reproducible for your website. Need cartoons, movie trailers or computer chronicles to rev up your site (perhaps as illustrations for your content)? You get all these and more from Internet Archive.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is the first producer of free e-books. It presently has 20,000 free e-books for downloading, and no less than 2 million among them are downloaded each month. What are free e-books? These are those whose copyright no longer exist, and so are now available in public domain. This means you can put them on your website (subject to copyright laws in the country you reside), and may be even sell.
Not strictly a source of content article, but then who knows you can as well weave some words of your own around some of these free e-books! Especially if you have blockbuster titles like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Time Machine, The Canterbury Tales, etc to go with!
Creative Commons (CC)
Another great resource is Creative Commons (CC for short), which provides 'attribution' license to share, reuse and remix work with others. CC is unique in the sense that it 'provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry'. Which means you can unearth reusable content like audio, video, image or text from the piles that CC has to reproduce on your website.
Article Directories
But of course you've hundreds of article directories (notably Ezine@rticles, GoArticles among others), to either source or draw inspiration from for your next article. Remember one thing though, most search engines no longer favor duplicate contents. So what you can do is modify an existing writing and tailor it here and there to create your own content.
There are many other sources to help you ride the dilemma of having enough content article for your website. If you're at it for a while, you'll appreciate what I have said above, which is 'nothing beats good amount of content as an essential part of optimization strategy'. Off you go, and here is wishing you good luck.
