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Finding Free Content for your websiteOnce you have come up with an idea for a home business website, and decided what it's particular mission is, you will then need to make sure that it has an adequate amount of content. The amount of content you need depends on the purpose of your site. If the goal of the site is to achieve a high ranking for a competitive keyword or keyword phrase on a major search engine, then your site will likely require a lot of content. If your site is going to depend heavily on return visitors then you may not need quite so much content but you will probably need the type of updated content that will draw return visitors, such as a blog, a newsfeed, or an updated article feed. If your site does not take orders and does not require much search engine or return traffic, then you may need very little in the way of content. For example, let's say you have a a small New hampshire or Vermont hobby shop. You may want to have a website with your contact information and directions to your store, basically a WWW address to put on your business cards and stationary. In this case you may not need search engine traffic or return visitors so your content needs are minimal, But if, on the other hand, you had an e-commerce site designed to compete on the internet with other e-commerce sites over a high-traffic keyword phrase such as "software products" or "Florida vacation packages", then your content needs will likely be substantial due to the heavy competition of these phrases on the search engines. Why you need Free Content Once you have deduced the needs of your site you can look at what type of content you need. Content for your site could come in the form of articles you write yourself, articles you obtain free-reprint rights to, reports, weblogs or anything else of value to your visitors. The more keyword-rich the better. A good example would be the archiving of previous newsletters, articles or ezines on your website for people to browse through. Search Engines love this kind of stuff because for them to be considered relevent they need to produce relevent, content-rich results in their search results. They know that the engines which produce such solid results, such as Google, please their visitors. The search engines that do not soon become extinct or marginalized. For this reason they reward good content with high search result rankings. If you give their customers what they want, the search engines will give you what you want-high keyword rankings. If you need to add entire pages of content to your website, especially pages with keywords related to your site, then adding articles is probably the easiest way to go. There are several sites which offer free articles for reprint. They include articlecity.com, ideamarketers.com, ezinearticles.com and expertarticles.com. What is great about these content providers is that you can browse their topic categories to find the right articles for your site. So whether your site is about dog grooming or vacationing in South Carolina, you should be able to find articles relating to your topic. The only catch with adding an article to your site is that you are required to add the author's 'byline' or resource box at the end of the article which generally has their contact information. However, in some cases, one article could be spread out and provide 2 or even 3 pages of content for your website. Creating multiple pages of content that link back to your homepage is very important because each of those pages adds to your overall link popularity and therefore your pagerank. Furthermore, an abundance of good content will give your site credibility. It appears that when a search engine spider visits your site and follows all the links, it determines the structure of the site from it's content links. If your site is deemed to be a content rich site the relevency of the site is increased. In addition to articles, you may also want to add other typed of free content to your site from a site like bravenet.com. There you can get free guestbooks, free message forums, guestmaps, live chats and e-mail forms. Blogs, guestbooks and forums are great content becaue there are constantly being automatically updated and refreshed by your users. Wembmaster Engine dot com can provide you with free templates and clip-art for your site, while freesticky.com provides free message boards, News headlines, articles, Cartoons and Jokes, Tickers and Weather reports. Good content is essential good search engine positioning and plenty of returning visitors. The saying "Content is King" is not just an empty phrase. This article may be reprinted free of charge. However, you must add a link back to home business match at the end of the article. |