Hidden Content Sources for Your Website

One of my favorite sites for web marketing instruction is SiteProNews.

Hidden Content
Sources for Your Website
By Kim Roach (c) 2006

As I travel through the Google search engine, there is one element that defines almost all of the top-ranking websites. It's great content. People come online for information and those that offer the best content reap the greatest rewards.
Unfortunately, this type of content is hard to come by. In most cases, you either have to spend hours in front of the keyboard or outsource the job to others. Both of these options are very costly. One requires your valuable time and the other requires an investment of around $10 - $20 per article.

That's why I have scoured the net in search of valuable free content sources. I'm still not quite sure why I'm revealing my treasured piles of free content, but I certainly hope you enjoy them.

One of my favorite sources of content is public domain. This comprises the body of knowledge without a copyright. Anyone can use this material for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Below are some excellent sources for public domain material.

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a library of 18,000 free ebooks whose copyright has expired. "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", "Pride and Prejudice", "The Time Machine", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and "The Canterbury Tales" have all passed into the public domain.

This means that you can put these on your website or even sell them in electronic or book format.

Explore a wealth of free content at Gutenberg.org.

Archive.org
At Archive.org you can find thousands of works that are currently in the public domain. Want to put some cartoons on your web site? Check out the "Film Chest Vintage Cartoons", which is full of classic animated cartoons from the 1930's and 1940's. The collection includes Popeye, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, The Three Stooges and Betty Boop. They also provide tons of other reproducable content including:

Brick Films: Commonly called "LEGO Movies". Brick films are dedicated to the art of stop motion animation.

SabuCat Movie Trailers: The world's largest collection of theatrical trailers.

Feature Films: A large number of classic feature films and shorts.

Universal Newsreels: Newsreels were shown before every feature film in the pre-tv era.

Computer Chronicles: Was the world's most popular television program on personal technology during the height of the computer revolution.

Net Cafe: Television series covering the revolution during the height of the dot com boom.

All of these content sources are available for you to put on your website. check them out at Archive.org.

Another popular public domain destination is Wikipedia.org. Here you will find over 1 million articles ranging from Greek mythology and Egyptian history to business, health, and technology.

Go to Wikipedia.org for a huge collection of articles you can reprint on your own website.

Creative Commons
Every creative work receives copyright protetion as soon as you put pen to paper, hit save, or press record. Because of this, no one can use that work without express permission from the author.

Creative Commons provides a new content license that allows you to share your work with others. If you want, you can even allow other people to expand upon your existing work. This allows for creative co-authorship.

The Creative Commons license has made piles of content available for use on your web site. Whether you are looking for audio, images, video, or text, you can find an abundance of reusable information within the creative commons.

To search for content to put on your own web site, go to CreativeCommons.org.

Government Web Sites
Works produced by the U.S. Federal government are not copyrighted. If you obtain a government document from the net, you are free to copy and distribute the document. I have found plenty of great content about finance, retirement, health, business, and traveling on government websites.

To search for content offered by the United States government, go to http://www.google.com/unclesam.

Article Directories
There are thousands of writers on the internet and many of them would love for you to reprint their articles on your website. You can find thousands of free web articles at the following article directories.

GoArticles.com
EzineArticles.com
ArticleCity.com


Interviews
I consider interviews to be one of the best sources of quality content for your site. Simply interview industry professionals and post the recording and transcript on your website. This allows you to create original content very quickly.

Don't be afraid to ask for an interview, most experts would be delighted to speak with you. Remember, this is probably one of their greatest passions. If you ask them politely, your chances for landing an interview are good.

You can conduct an interview in person, over the phone, or even through an e-mailed questionaire.

RSS Feeds
RSS is changing the way we consume information online. In addition, it has also provided thousands of new content sources for the online publisher. RSS is simply a file format similar to XML that is used by publishers to make their content available to others in a format that can be easily understood by web publishing software and content aggregators.

By using RSS feeds, you can enhance the content on your site without ever writing a single word. And remember, on the Internet, content is King.

Want to put Amazon products on your site, updated news from the New York Times, financial advice from Motley Fool, or press releases from PRWeb?

This is all possible with RSS. No matter what type of information you are looking for, RSS can provide you with a constant stream of updated content for your web site.

To search for an RSS feed to enhance your own website, go to Syndic8.com. You can even mix and match a variety of rss feeds at RSSMix.com.

Facts & Statistics
Looking for facts or figures to put on your website? Take a look at some of the sources below. You'll likely be surprised how many facts, figures, and definitions are available in the public domain.

The CIA World Factbook provides a number of statistics on countries, territories, and dependencies. Each profile tracks such demographics as population, ethnicity, and literacy rates, as well as political, geographical and economic data.

http://www.census.gov/: One of the largest repositories for data and statistics related to the U.S.

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Main_Page: One of the best encyclopedia's ever written was published over 90 years ago. Search over 40,000 articles, all of which are available for publication on your own site.

http://www.bibliomania.com/2/3/257/frameset.html: A searchable interface of the 1913 public domain Webster's dictionary.

Private Label Articles
Private label articles can be bought for pennies per article. This is possible because they are sold in bulk.

Many people criticize these articles and have declared them as worthless. However, I am here to tell you that private label articles can be very powerful when used appropriately.

Unless you have hours of free time every day, it is unlikely that you are going to be able to create the amount of quality content that your web site deserves. This is where private label content enters the picture.

You can use private label articles to:


Add content to your web site.
Acquire hundreds of inbound links by syndicating the articles to article directories.
Create a free report for your visitors and other website publishers.
Create an information-packed RSS feed.
However, the key to using private label articles effectively is to optimize them. Straight out of the box, these articles are near worthless. To give them value, you must add your own touch.

Inject your personality into the article. Combine multiple articles and do some additional touch-ups to ensure that the article is in top shape for your readers.

Once you are finished you can add your resource box and send it off to article directories and website publishers.

If you are looking for one of the top private label article providers, go to InfoGoRound.com.

Images
Quality images can make your content much more inviting and keep people at your site for longer periods of time. Fortunately, there is a site that offers thousands of pictures completely free of charge. Find it at Stock.XCHNG.

Quotes
Quotes can give your website a special touch. Quotes provide interesting content in addition to an element of credibility. I often like to add related quotes to my web site simply to engage the reader's attention.

To find some quotes for your website, go to QuoteLand.com.

In the end, you always want your content to be unique. Not for the search engines, but for your visitors. With quality content comes quality links. Once you have built up a reputation for delivering unique content, you will never have to worry about having an audience eager to visit your website.


About The Author
Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews and SEO-News newsletters. You can contact Kim at: kim @ seo-news.com

This article may be freely distributed without modification and provided that the copyright notice and author information remain intact.

Marketing your Online Business - Effective Search Engine Optimization by Jon Peckham

It is a fact that few web search surfers will click beyond the first two to three pages of search results looking for what they need. If they do not find it within the first few pages of search results they will either search again using a different search engine or they will search on slightly different search terms.



The goal of search engine optimization is about creating a web site that reaches the first page of the search results for the particular keywords or keyword phrases you are targeting. Search engine optimization or SEO is becoming more and more important as the competition increases for top placement among on the search engines. Hundreds, if not thousands, of new web sites are being added to the World Wide Web on a daily basis and they are all competing for top placement.



Search engine optimization does not have to be complicated or elusive. In fact, you are probably better off staying away from some of the more questionable search engine optimization strategies and sticking to the basics. The foundation of basic search engine optimization is to weave relevant keywords into your web site throughout your internal and external links, the URL addresses of each individual page, and most importantly, content.



You can significantly increase the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts by carefully choosing the right keywords.



The most important part of search engine optimization is choosing the right keywords and keyword phrases to use in optimizing your web site. You need to know what keywords web search surfers are searching for when searching for your products or services. Once you have a list of popular search terms you then need to determine how much competition there is for each particular term and possible choose keywords where you have a realistic chance of being competitive.



For example, let us assume your keyword is “search engine optimization” You may find that this term is very competitive. In fact, at the time of this article, there were 83,600,000 search results returned on a search using “search engine optimization.” While you certainly want to optimize your site for this keyword you should also seek less competitive keywords. For example, at the time of this article, if you were you to search Google on the phrase “search engine optimization strategies” you would return approximately 29,600,000 results. This is certainly going to be less competitive. There are likely going to be hundreds more keyword alternatives using the phrase search engine optimization. The question you may have is how do you do research on what keyword phrases are best to use.



There are some good tools available on the Internet for doing keyword research for your search engine optimization purposes.



Yahoo Search Marketing is an excellent tool that is available for free. This particular search engine optimization tool s located at the following URL address.



http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php



To get started simply go to the box near the middle of the page and Enter a keyword to see how many searches were done on that keyword within the last month. Not only will you receive the number of searches for that particular search term but also all of the possible alternatives. Simply by paying attention to the number of searches done on a particular term you can have a pretty good idea of what kind of competition exists for each term. It is generally a good idea to target keywords or keyword phrases that have less than 50,000 searches.



Another excellent tool for doing keyword research is available at Wordtracker.com Wordtracker is not free but is probably one of the best keyword analysis tools available on the Internet. If you are serious about search engine optimization you will want to check out Wordtracker.



Choosing the right keywords is the foundation of effective search engine optimization and will be the key to getting your site to the top.

Other Articles That May Interest You...

Finding Keywords Worth Gold That Are Easy To Optimize For…
Trying to get into the search engine optimization game? Well, here is a way to quickly find the most profitable keywords that are easy to optimize for. This is the hidden strategy that all successful businesses use to start.


How To Select Keywords For Search Engine Optimization

We rely on your feedback, so please take the time to let us know what you thought of this article.

About This Author:

Jonathan Peckham can help YOU start your own profitable business on the Internet within the next 24 hours... To learn more, visit:

http://www.jpktmarketing.com/pips.html

Raising Your Rank

Both Google and Yahoo rank your website based on it's importance to the average internet surfer.

How do you make your website more important? One way is to increase the important content. Work on your website all the time, adding pages of information that may be useful to your prospect. Update your website frequently, creating a need for the surf engine "spiders" to review your web site over and over. This method is very labor intensive and requires you to spend alot of time tweaking your site.

Another way is to increase your relevancy. Google and Yahoo determine your relevancy by counting the number of websites that link to your website. You should ask all of your friends who have websites to exchange links with you so that each of you can increase your relevancy. More effective is to join a business group like the California Business Directory. It's an electronic Business Mixer - similar to passing out your card at the local chamber social.


Google explains it's ranking philosophy.

Yahoo - Search engines and results/

Is Your Paid Advertising Working?

Do you have a tracking program that tells you what percentage of the clicks to your website are coming from your paid advertising? What websites are generating clicks to your website for free?

Sign up with the California Business Directory and you'll get tools that will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your paid advertising.