Unless you've been living in a cave on the edge of god only knows what wasteland, you've heard that having your own article directory filled with relevant articles gives your site a content rich, search engine friendly site that will drive unlimited visitors to your website.

The problem is how to go about setting one up and what tools you need to help you get the content that will drive search engine traffic to it.

The tools are the easy part, this of course depends on whether you want to go the free route or pay high prices for software programs to automate the process. You can do it either way. I'll give you the free tools and a method that you can use to get started immediately.

What's your first step?

The first thing you'll want to do is set up a folder on your website for your article directory and article pages. You can call thix anything you like but for this article we'll call it /articles

So the link to it would look something like this: yoursite.com/articles

Inside this folder you'll have a page named index.htm This will be your main article directory page where you'll list the categories your articles will cover.

You can see an example of how one looks here: http://www.cashway.com/articles

Let's say for example your site is about dogs. Some of the main categories might be:

- Dog Training

- Dog Grooming

- Dog Health

- Weight Loss For Dogs

The best way to do this is to create a template page that you can use throughout your directory so as to keep the look the same.

Remember, the main goal of the article is to provide relevant content for you visitors as well as attract the search engine spiders in order to help improve your site rankings.

You also need to keep in mind that you should spend some time optimizing those pages for the search engines so that you present a well developed directory loaded with content that the search engines will want to return to again.

OK, so you've got the main index.htm page set up so now you need to create a sub folder for each category of article you're providing to your visitors.

The structure should look something like this:

/articles/dogtraining
/articles/doghealth
/articles/doggrooming
/articles/dogweightloss

And again inside the sub folder you will have an index.htm page On the index page you will list the articles with the link that leads to it. The link path will vary depending on whether you set up individual pages to the article on your site or whether you provide a direct link to the article on a different site.

Either way works, and a combination of both is good because it gives you outgoing links for the SE's to follow.

Once you have the basic structure in place and a template page to work with then the rest is simply a copy and paste process that can be done a few articles a day. If you add just 2 articles a day you'll have more than 60 articles by the end of a month

That's good, solid content rich pages that search engines love.

Step 2 - Where do you get articles?

I think you're going to love this short cut I'm going to give you here. You can get all of the Free articles you want about your particular 'niche' by utilizing the search engines.

But, you'll want to pursue one search method above the rest because I've found that it gives you very high quality, targeted articles that will provide useful, relevant content for your site.

Click on the following link: http://news.google.com

Once you're there then look at the upper right hand corner for the "Advanced News Search" link, and click on it.

You'll be sent to a page with a form that you can list your keywords to search for the kind of articles relevant to your site.

There are 4 different search types so you can experiment to find the content you want. Google Advanced News Search searches over 4500 sources for new and old articles that can provide content for your site.

Let's say you do a search for "dog training" and it returns 60 or more articles. You can copy and paste the summary of all of the articles listed on the pages returned in the search into your template page or you can go to each article and copy and paste them to individual pages that you host on your website.

Either way you choose to add the articles to your pages, you now have loads of fresh, relevant content for your site.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Copyright 2005 Ed Duvall

Succeed in driving laser targeted traffic to your site. Download our Free one of kind, highly effective ebook: "8 Steps To Claiming YOUR SHARE Of The Enormous Traffic Available Everyday From The Search Engines..."

Resource box must remain as is if republished.