The internet stores a massive amount of information and much of that is in text. To find quality content to return for search queries the search engines look for sites with text content and the more the better.

If you have ever wondered why your website is not receiving any traffic, you are probably looking for a way to increase it. Most webmasters on the internet are because they realize that traffic is what will make their site a success.

You should consider taking a two pronged approach to building links. The first method for building links is through submissions of your site to quality webs directories. Every link you get to your site is not only a vote in popularity, but also a doorway for traffic. Every quality link you can get through directory submissions will bring more relevance to your site.

How you can use article marketing.

The first way you can use article marketing is by going to article directories. If you can't write your own unique content (which is preferred) for your site, you can use the content from article directories to place on your site for content as long as you retain the authors resource box. You need the content there for the search engines to spider when they visit through all the linking pathways you created when submitting your site to quality web directories.

As we covered the internet contains a massive amount of information and people search for it every day. The more links you have pointing to your site and the more content you have on it relevant to your sites niche, the better you will rank for search engine queries.

Another way to use article marketing is by writing your own unique articles on topics related to your websites niche and submit them for publication to the best article directories. These articles will create some links to your website to increase its popularity and with each link comes another doorway for traffic to find you.

When you write and publish these articles, you are also letting the public know you have expertise and knowledge on the subject. To get the reader's attention, give them a quality, well written article filled with information.

Build links through quality directory submissions to increase your site's popularity and create doorways to traffic and search engines. Then use article marketing to provide quality on-site content for the search engines to spider when they arrive.

About the Author: Bruce Swedal - Gain an online presence for your Website by getting listed on The Authority Website Directory.

The Web 2.0 social media revolution is in full steam. Are people finding your website?

As an entrepreneur, how do you make your business website stand out amongst 435 million other websites and more than 1 million blogs competing for your audience's attention?

It's not as hard as you might think.

Web 2.0 Strategy: Why You Should Be a Maven, Not a Marketer

As a website owner, how should you position your message in the Web 2.0 world?

The increasingly savvy buying public will quickly shun marketers. Internet readers want information from the Internet. They don't want advertising, marketing, or a "pitch".

According to Schefren in his Attention Age Doctrine, the solution is to become a social media "Maven".

A Maven is a trusted authority, like a friend, on the social media websites. As you gain their trust, your audience will return to you over and over again wanting to invest in your advice.

Five Steps to Becoming a Social Media Maven

Social Media Maven Step 1: Get in the Game

Begin blogging immediately. Create a video explaining how to solve a problem and put it on YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook with links back to your main website. Just those two things alone will establish more Web 2.0 presence than 90% of your competition.

Social Media Maven Step 2: Share your passion

Build your Web 2.0 website around your passions. Thirty-two year old Gary Vaynerchuk transformed his wine knowledge to his video blog. It now has thousands of subscribers and does $50 millíon dollars a year in wine sales.

Social Media Maven Step 3: Be Controversial

Your audience will remember you more when you challenge the status quo. Controversy sells. Think like the tabloids and the local news channels here. For example, Web 2.0 Business Coach Rich Schefren challenges traditional marketing wisdom in each release of his Attention Age Doctrine special reports at www.attentionage.net/doctrine.

Social Media Maven Step 4: Create World Class Content

You will drive repeat traffic to your website by offering top notch "how to" information. Gary's wine tastings are highly educational on the benefits of wine, how to cook with wine, and how to choose a wine for your special occasion. Rich's reports teach Web 2.0 marketing principles.

Remember, as soon as your audience feels that you are "pitching" them, you've lost them. So provide content not advertising.

Social Media Maven Step 5: Engage in the Conversation

Web 2.0 is a dialogue not a monologue. Internet businesses profít more when they observe and listen to their communities first before they broadcast their messages. Savvy mavens such as Gary and Rich encourage their audience to ask questions. The answers to these questions then become part of their user-generated content.

How Marketing in a Web 2.0 Social Media Environment Is Exciting.

Visualize it like a big radio or television station or movie screen where you're the star. You're building a fan base so you need to entertain, inform, and deliver consistently for your audience.

You have more publishing power at your fingertips right now than at any time in history.

So use it.

Share your passions.

Reveal your trials and tribulations

Tell your story.

And, watch how quickly your audience builds.

You won't find many article marketing secrets being given away online, because very few people properly understand the power of this internet marketing tool. It is more than simply a way of getting links back to your website, but a very powerful tool that if used properly can increase your sales to another level.

If you are provided with 'secrets' then they are well known by almost everybody. I will admit that even the 'secrets' I am about to divulge are not secrets at all, but well known article marketing techniques. However, what I will also say is that the three provided here are neither appreciated nor used by all of even those that profess to be marketing 'gurus'.

I know that because I have purchased many of their books and they don't suggest what I suggest: I know my systems work and can prove it through my website listings. However I must stop because I am becoming dangerously close to advertising, but I have done so as to indicate about the maximum you can do on article directories to advertise yourself: and that is your free tip. Do not advertise in your articles if they are intended for submission. Leave that for your 'author's resource box'.

The most common purpose for people writing articles and offering them to directories for publication is to get those all-important back links from the directories. However, just stand back a bit and think why the directories are in existence. It is not for your benefit. It is not to provide you with a free means of improving your Google PageRank, but they exist to make money. And why not? Otherwise there would be no point in anybody offering an article directory to all of these online writers.

You don't pay to have your articles published on the directories, so what is their purpose? How do these people make money? Two ways in fact: the first is by means of Adsense. If you do a search for an article on a specific topic, you will certainly find one because articles have been written on every topic on the planet. On the same page you will find Adsense ads. The reason for this is obvious and also psychological.

It is because most articles are not worth reading, and visitors generally have a quick look at them before leaving the directory site to seek proper information on their topic or niche. That is when they are liable to click on the Adsense ads and make money for the directory owner. That is added to the second way they make money which is from payment for speeding up the listing of the articles. You've seen the thing: get listed in several weeks or pay a few dollars for an instant listing. Like most other serious marketers, I pay.

Whichever means they use, article directories realize that it is to their advantage to get high search engine listings for as many articles as possible. They then have their sites visited by as many people as possible, and also have writers use them. That provides them with more visitors to click the Adsense ads and also as an inducement to other budding authors who might pay for listings. I don't pay for a listing in a site that never has my articles in Google.

Here are three secrets or tips, that you can use in your own article marketing campaigns:

Secret #1 is that if you write the article on a topic related to the content of a page on your website, then the directory (and by that I mean the owner, but let's call it 'the directory' for simplicity) will do all the SEO work and get your article listed so as to get as many visitors as possible. That earns them money. What that means to you is that you get free SEO done on your article.

Why do you think that your articles have to be of a minimum length and of a certain standard? To be listed by search engines, especially Google, that's why. You can use this information to your advantage, but your articles must be at least 500 words. Your resource URL must be one related to the article, and if you make it your blog, that is even better. Place links on your blog to all your other relevant online ventures.

Secret #2 is not really a secret as a submission technique. When you have finished writing your article save it and submit it as a text file. Most people write using Microsoft word, or some other word processing software that uses their own formating code embedded in the article. You don't see it, but the search engines do and it could harm the listing of the directory web page containing your article.

About the Author: If you are interested in more of Pete's article marketing secrets, and some of the best are to come, then visit his Squidoo lens at SEOcious or perhaps his blog at My SEO Blog where you will find more about his personal SEO philosophy.

Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning is a New Zealander who joined Google in 2000 as a Senior Research Scientist to develop more precise search techniques. Previously, Craig was an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department of Rutgers University, where he conducted research in data compression, information retrieval and computational biology. Before that, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Biochemistry Department of Stanford University, where he developed a software suite used by pharmaceutical research laboratories to identify the role of particular proteins within cells.

A scientist at heart, Craig is probably best known as the developer of Froogle (recently re-named Google Product Search) and the founder of Google's software engineering center in New York City.

Google's Spelling Bee

Craig started his presentation by talking about one of his first challenges in his job at Google: the spelling correction tool. As the popularity of the search engine grew, Google needed to be able to spell-correct lots of obscure words. So his solution was to take a sampling of content from the entire web. Craig's team came up with a algorithmic model and ran it over the web. He discovered that there were several correct answers to the same question. For example, words like "kofee" could mean either the searcher is seeking a cup of java or information about Kofee/Kofi Anan.

To combat this, Craig came up with an interesting solution: the "Did you mean?" alternative spelling option, based on predictive examples of searcher spelling patterns. You can see this in action if you type in "kofee anan" in Google. Above the search results is a line that reads: "Did you mean: kofi annan" and links to the search results for this spelling variation too.

But the research went even further. Craig's team worked out how to take into account the context of the search query by studying the two or three other keywords surrounding the query, for example "kofee cup" or "kofee anan". The research used the science of bigrams and trigrams to better understand how people search. Bigrams are groups of two written letters, two syllables, or two words, very commonly used as the basis for simple statistical analysis of text. So Craig and his team applied this knowledge to Google's spelling correction system and now, Google's algorithm can determine the searcher's intent with much more accuracy, based on the context of the search query.

As an example of the spelling challenges that Google faces, Craig showed the audience the huge number of ways "Britney Spears" is misspelled on the web. He said it's encouraging to see that the most popular spelling is also the most correct one. Scale is important! 

Google Maps Lead to Apps

The Google team wrote the code for Google Maps many years ago but the code was actually built into your browser. When Google maps first launched, people took the dense data-script and worked out how to reverse engineer it for their own use. Google engineers decided to release an API key to make these mash-ups easier after seeing so many people reverse engineer Google Maps without Google's help. Now people can mash-up Google maps within minutes to create their own applications.

To show how easy this is to do, Craig took the audience through the steps to create an interactive application with Google Maps. In the space of about two minutes, he signed up for an API key, grabbed the HTML code and pasted it into his page. He then hacked the map to show Wellington Town Hall (our location) and made the point how easy it is to create really useful tools out of technology that is already available.

As an example, Craig showed the audience Seattle Bus Monster. This site uses an API key for Google Maps to make Seattle bus data and tracking available 24/7. Anyone who needs to catch a bus can look online and instantly find their nearest bus location and run to the bus stop in time to catch it. It's these types of interactive applications that add value to both corporate and government sites.

Craig referenced Rodney Brooks from MIT whose provocative paper "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" offered new logic and a completely different view of machines. The idea is that there is no center of control among robots so you should make lots of them; don't treat them so precious. Craig said developers should use this logic to create lots of small apps that you can replicate and tweak, rather than one big expensive app that can go horribly wrong. Scale trumps smarts every time!

Experiments in Scale That Have Impacted Google's Operations

Precision vs. Recall

Back in the early 90's, information retrieval on the web was limited to things like Lexus/Nexus. So at that stage, Google would take queries and apply it to the broadest possible search. This was great recall at the cost of precision. But Larry and Sergey wanted something better so they decided to use Boolean search. At the time it was heresy because everything was focused on recall. But the Google founders knew that things had to be super relevant so they developed an algorithm - the core algorithm. It was very simple and relied on Boolean search to determine relevancy.

Genomic Sequencing

In the mid 90's a large project - the Human Genome Project - was underway. The race was on to sequence the genome. Scientists decided to feed this out to a bunch of different people. They chopped up the genome for researchers everywhere and allowed it to replicate. The researchers mapped each chunk with genetic markers and computed a tiling path of tiny fragments.

Sequencing was very expensive, so the data was computed based on a minute number of chunks - very labor intensive. The sequencing took forever and reassembling was a long way off. But then a company came along that said they could do it faster. Sequencing becomes cheaper by automating the job using machines rather than individual people so this company used a clever computer algorithm to conduct the sequencing. This reduced the cost and the researchers were therefore able to reassemble more fragments and achieve a rough draft of the genome in 2000. This sequencing approach was the shotgun approach, where accuracy is lower, but the larger scale allowed the impossible to become possible.

Web Definitions

Google used to do a terrible job of defining terms. Craig noticed people were searching for "definition of...", or "what is a...." etc so he wanted the search engine to provide better results for these searches. He found lots of web pages that contained glossaries and definitions, so he hacked up a Perl script to get the glossary formats.

The first recall results were only 50 percent accurate. He wanted to improve this rate, so he did some experiments with the data. But he could never reach an accuracy level he was happy with. It was later he realized that most of the questions people actually needed answers to could be answered with his crappy little Perl script. He concluded that 100 percent accuracy is not important, that scale is much more important.

Now Google allows you to use the "definition:" query and the question format to get definitions from around the web. Type in "what is a blog?" and you'll get lots of results from Craig's original script.

Protein Sequencing

In biology, Craig says, you're constantly producing proteins. The proteins fold up with particular sequencing. Within computing, you can use this knowledge to do amazing things. You can conduct computations with this type of data but it's time consuming. Somebody at Stanford University noticed that proteins spend a lot of time moving about before folding into an alpha helix. So it was suggested they start the computations with lots of configurations. In this way you can parallelize the data by scale and one will be magically close to a folded protein. So they worked out a way to reduce the problem to a simple process based on mass scale. This is why Google uses maximum scale to conduct algorithmic computations.

Chess vs. Go

You can now compute the value of any potential move in chess. Based on that information, you can compute your projected probability of winning the game from any move. Chess grand masters put a lot of time into this knowledge. But the opposite is true for the game Go, because there is more randomness to the game play.

(Stay tuned for Part 2)