Best Practises in Article Directory Management and Generating Free Content
by Rex Haney
Free web content is, as a result of the basic and essential requirement for relevant,
and substantial, information, a hot commodity on the Internet today. The Internet, after
all, is a massive resource of readily available information served up on demand by search
engines and, for the most part free.
Web content, plenty of it, relevant, and constantly changing is what ensures regular
visits from the search engine spiders, it can quite literally be the critical success
factor for any website, irrespective of its purpose. The Article Directory owner plays a
valuable role in the free web content supply chain that needs to be understood in order
for the directory to succeed.
Unfortunately, the Internet is littered with examples of webmasters falling foul of the
"put up an article directory, everyone supplies me with free web content, then a miracle
happens and I get rich", equation. So, it is important to understand the free web content
value proposition in order to manage an article directory successfully with best practise
in mind.
Fundamentally webmasters want their sites to be found. People, looking for specific
information, products, or services, typically, use a search engine to find what they are
looking for. The search engines strive to serve the user by delivering highly relevant
results. They do this by indexing the entire Internet and ranking the results by way of
their authority. The way they do this, and therefore the pivot in the free web content
value proposition, is by following links. The webmaster wants his site to be ranked
highly, or in other words seen as an authority site. In order to do that his mission becomes
getting as many quality links back to his site as is necessary to achieve that goal.
One well recognised, and legitimate, method of achieving quality back links to a site
is article writing. The premise behind this is simple. The webmaster writes an article and
gets it published on another site, or many sites, the article is indexed by the search
engines and the author's link back to his site boosts the sites link popularity, and
therefore its ranking.
As a consequence of this, article directories have become repositories, accommodating
the supply and demand of free web content, providing a location for articles to be
indexed, providing link popularity to webmasters, and supplying publishers who need a
steady supply of fresh, on topic, free web content for their sites, ezines, and blogs.
So the free web content value proposition is this; first and foremost the reader,
looking for accurate and pertinent information, relies upon the search engines to find it,
the search engines, at a very simplistic level, use page rank, determined by link
popularity, to serve accurate results to the reader.
The webmaster, who wants her site to be found by the reader, exchanges some of
her expertise, in the form of free web content articles, in return for a back link to boost
her sites popularity. The article directory owner hosts, distributes, and ensures that
articles are indexed, in return for the monetization opportunity associated with having
thousands of pages of free web content, along with the proliferation of back links to
the directory itself as a result of the articles being used on other sites and publications.
There is, however, a problem with this that undermines the value for all concerned.
That is when the back link is seen as more important than the article quality itself and,
as is the case with many internet marketing concepts, the more unscrupulous operators
propagate the internet with minimum word count, inferior, often plagiarized, and useless
material, creating back links to sites of equally inferior quality and dubious purpose. The
question then becomes what free web content quality is expected in return for a back link?
The Article Directory owner has an integral role to play in ensuring the quality of
information available in the internet today. It could be argued that maintaining a high
standard of quality free web content in directories such as this could improve the overall
experience of using the Internet altogether.
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