by: Tom Smith

You heard writing articles is a great way to drive traffic to your
site. So you have written several articles and posted them to dozens
of article sites. Then you sit back and wait for the avalanche of
traffic. And wait. Nothing is happening. What’s the deal?

The deal is depending on where your article gets republished your
links may not be “live”. Writing articles and posting them is a
great way to drive traffic to your site. Search engines love it and
if done correctly it will help drive new visitors to your site and
get you listed higher in the search engines. The problem comes when
article writers and authors and publishers don’t all follow the same
rules. The main problems are:

1. Original article not formatted correctly
2. Article copied and pasted into new webpage without links
3. New publisher doesn’t make links live

Lets start with #1 “Original article not formatted correctly”. Not
all article sites are the same. On some sites you can simply put in
plain text and it will format it correctly, paragraphs will be
correct and it will recognize http://www.yoursite.com as a live
link. Some sites you may need to format it all in html. Sometimes
the easiest way to do that is type your article in a web design
program such as “Dreamweaver” and then view the source and copy and
paste the code. If you don’t have access to such a program then you
should learn a few basic html tags:

View the source of this page to see the html tags.

This is a “break” tag, The break tag is used when you want to end a
line, but don't want to start a new paragraph. The break tag forces
a line break wherever you place it, a very common tag and one that
is recognized by most all article sites.


Bold anything you want in bold should go between these tags


italic anything you want in italic should go between these tags


http://www.yoursite.com--some sites will recognize this as a live
link. Many will not! This is where you are going to lose your links!
If your article is copied and pasted into another web page or ezine
your link will not be clickable. Someone who really wants to go to
your webpage can copy and paste it into their browser but it is alot
easier if someone can just click on it! If it is not a clickable
live link search engines will not follow it not matter how many
times it is republished. Imangine your article being reprinted 1000
times, a potential of 1000 back links to your site but without it
being a clickable link you won’t reap the benefits of those 1000
links. Your links to your sites should always be formatted this way:

YourWebSite

If you follow the correct html formating for links your website
links will always be clickable. To learn more about html tags search
google for "html tags"

2. Article copied and pasted into new webpage without links. Your
article may be correctly formatted on the article site you posted to
but when it is copied and pasted into a new webpage or ezine it may
lose some of it’s formatting. Some of the better sites have a choice
of “ezine ready”, this will display your article in the correct html
formatting which makes it easier to copy and paste.

3. New publisher doesn’t make links live. All article sites have a
policy that clearly states “you are free to republish the article as
long as the links and author bio stays with the article” Some don’t
realize your links are no longer live or don’t know to make them
live. Others leave them off all together or don’t make them live on
purpose. Not much you can do except write to the website owner and
request they make them live. Some will comply, some won’t. Chalk it
up to the cost of doing business. For everysite that doesn’t make
your links live, 10 will.

Keep publishing! Writing articles and posting them across the
internet is still a great way to drive traffic to your site. Content
is king and website owners, and ezine publishers are hungry for
fresh new original content.

This article is free for republishing
TJ Smith is the creative force behind several websites including
Article Boy article submission site and content archive and
The Blogger Nation Blog Directory