One of the most important factors of getting your web site noticed by the search engines is having lots of fresh keyword-rich text content on your site. This is really the easiest and least expensive way to make your site grow quickly.
There are hundreds of article directories on the internet, offering thousands of articles on almost any topic imaginable, all of which are absolutely free to reproduce on your site. There are links to some of the best article directories in the "Lesson Resources" section below. As long as you follow the publishing guidelines of each directory, you can add as many articles to your site as you like.
Since you will want to leave articles on your site permanently, a little basic planning of your article directory will save you a lot of time, and make for a clean site structure that search engines will like. Make a separate folder on your site for articles. Create a main index for your article directory, and link to this to and from your site's homepage, with descriptive text like "Browse Fitness Articles" or "Read More about Fitness." Your article index should include main categories such as "Yoga," "Pilates," "Jogging" and so on.
It is important to link to your article archive from your main page or from one of the pages in the upper levels of your sites structure so that search engine robots will find all of that content. Create subfolders for each of these categories, as your article archive should grow to include dozens or even hundreds of articles. In the sub-index pages (the "Yoga Articles" page, for example) you can include only the article titles, which link to the article pages, or you can include the title and first line or two of the article's body text, with a "read more" at the end that links to the full article.
You will save a lot of time by making a template of your article page, so you can simply copy and paste in article content. Free articles do not normally include photos, but there is nothing to stop you from adding photos from your own collection to improve the look and layout of articles on your site.
If you maintain an e-mail newsletter, you can include information to your subscribers about newly-added articles. Again you can include the first few lines of an article's text with a link to the full text at your site. This will encourage your subscribers to keep coming back to your site, which is one of the goals of a newsletter.
Free Article Directories
There are hundreds of sites offering free articles that you can publish on your site. Some of the best are below. Be sure to check the publication guidelines for each directory. (A later lesson in this course will cover how to submit articles to these sites.)