3 Reasons to Add Articles to your Web Site

With content sites like Excess Voice, it’s a given that a large part of the site will be devoted to articles.

But even if you’re selling furniture or herbal supplements, the addition of a large number of articles to your site offers several benefits.

Benefit #1: The major search engines love single-topic text pages.

If you’re selling office furniture, for example, you probably have quite a few elements you need to put on your home page. You have categories to present and photos to include, offers to make etc.

Particularly with online retail sites, it can be a problem doing a full search engine optimization job with your home page. One way or another, your theme is going to be broad.

For instance, while you may show all kind of different kinds of furniture suitable for office use, it’s going to be tough optimizing your home page beyond your primary theme – office furniture.

If someone does a search for a specific item, like a kneeling chair, your home page is not very likely to appear high on the search results page.

Even your sales page for the kneeling chair will have an inner conflict when it comes to optimization...should you be optimizing for keywords, or for sales conversions? Probably the latter. And a product sales page may not always contain a great deal of copy.

So what do you do?

You write articles. And you don’t just write one article about kneeling chairs...you write five or ten. And you optimize each one for a particular keyword within the “kneeling chair” theme.

When you do that, you are far more likely to be listed high up for specific items in your inventory, and each article can contain a link to the appropriate sales page.

Benefit #2: People like articles too.

Some people may conduct a search while thinking, “I want to buy a kneeling chair”. But many others will type in the keywords while thinking something like, “What the heck is a kneeling chair? A colleague said it helped with her back pain, but I’d love to know more about this.”

A lot of searches start out as questions. And articles do a great job of answering questions. When your articles are each focused on a single topic and keyword, then you will be writing information that is almost certainly useful to your readers.

And if you do a great job of answering your readers’ questions, you increase the chance of them buying that product from your site, and not from your competitors.

Benefit #3: Engage your readers with a great article, and then get them as subscribers.

When you write a useful article, be sure to add your newsletter subscription form and offer immediately beneath it.

If a reader finds the information in your article useful and enlightening, then you have created just the right environment in which to ask him or her to sign up for your newsletter...and receive additional interesting articles.

In other words...the moment is perfect. You give them great content, and then invite them to sign up to get future articles by email.

You may not get a huge number of newsletter sign-ups from a single article.

But what if you published a hundred articles? Or two hundred?

Concluding thoughts...

Both people and search engines like single-topic pages which are relevant to the search query.

On many sites, both the home page and second level pages are attempting to address a variety of issues, and please a number of different stakeholders.

Article pages have no such burdens.

You can write them with the sole purpose of pleasing your readers, Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Resource Reviews:

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