Hi

I'm trying to promote my website www.abodewithme.com which is a house share and flat share website aimed at helping students, graduates, young professionals, etc., to find new housemates.

Due to limited finances, the main course of action I am now taking is to blog articles related generally to my market area, inserting search phrases into them and using them as anchors for hyperlinks to my homepage (as I have done in this articl).

I'm not exactly sure how effective these tactics are. I did notice that a week after a blog article my ranking for my target phrases seemed to improve, but I was also writing articles alongside paying an SEO company a monthly fee to increase rankings. As I need to spend my money on developing my site, the SEO has had to stop for now. Can enybody comment on whether my current approach is likely to yield the results that I'm looking for as I'm conscious that I could spend a lot of time for no results and that the money I'm saving with my SEO company is a false economy.

Thanks for your comments.
Lee

It took me a while to find your articles on your site...and when I found your articles, they were barely integrated with the rest of your site. Your top menu had disappeared and if I was a visitor, I would never have known what your site was about or that I could register (just by visiting one of your articles). Creating content is a good idea and can bring in traffic, but you also have to make use of that traffic once it gets to your page or else you're just wasting your time.

It took me awhile to find the articles too and when I did I noticed there isn't any rss feed being published. It looks like your articles are being powered by a reciprocal link management system. That's what it says anyway. I'd dump that and use something like WordPress which is a blogging system.

Blogging in general can be a good way to market yourself. You won't automatically rank well for everything just because you blog and blogging is hard work. Still it can be an effective way to market your site.

obviously your writing articles to earn money but It took a minute to find it,vangogh is right it's important if you have submitted your articles to different rss feed directories to get more visibility and traffic.

do social bookmarking ..it will also help you in getting traffic

Hi

Thanks for your comments.
You're right that the articles on my site are powered by a reciprocal link management system vangogh. However, this isn't really what I meant in my initial question.
What I actually do is write an article and submit it to other sites that publish press releases with hyperlinks under the keywords that I want to market the site against. For example:

<a href=”http://www.abodewithme.com”>house share</a>

The idea is that these articles create inbound one way links to the site that hopefully the search engines will spot, follow and build the association of that site against the phrase that I use. I guess that is the social bookmarking that sonisoni mentions? If not, what do you mean by this?

Ezhel - I make no money from writing my articles. The only reason I write them is to try to direct traffic and more specifically search engines towards my site. However, if there is a way of making money from the articles I would be please to hear it.

Thanks for your comments.

Lee

I make no money from writing my articles. The only reason I write them is to try to direct traffic and more specifically search engines towards my site. However, if there is a way of making money from the articles I would be please to hear it.

Well. if that's your only reason for writing articles...


... Give it up!

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=34999

Lee a better way to market your site through the articles you write is simply to write good articles and have other people link to them because they are good.

The reason I mentioned the reciprocal link management system is because I noticed it didn't include an rss feed. I think you'd ultimately get more return for syndicated your content through a feed. If you syndicated through rss and then worked at becoming part of the different communities around your site I think you'll find you'll end up with more and better links than through the method you're currently using.

You can also write articles for other sites or guest post for them to get your name in front of new audiences. Assuming your guest posts are good an on topic with your own articles a number of those reading your articles on other sites would likely go on to subscribe to your blog.

Lee you have a very god articles and I agree with vangogh, you must allow people to link to your blog or have a more exposure by submitting your blog to different blog directories or rss feed directories.

blogging is the best to get reffering site to get traffic..

try social media . . . i think it will help.

submit articles AND submit your website in directories

Hi Lee,

I suggest you try submitting your site to web directories and write articles and send them to major article submission sites like ezinearticles, goarticles and isnarearticles to name a few. You can also do blog commenting with your site's url so you get a relative amount of traffic to your site.

Blogging can be considered as a good tool for marketing a website but blogging isnt everything you need to do. As most of the web world works with search engines, you need to have good link building strategy to have organic results and traffic.

Try social media marketing too, which solely helps in getting more traffic.

i would like to add try to do a link baiting since you wrote a very good article...

You can also submit your blog to the blog directories (or even the dofollow directories if it happens to be a dofollow blog).