What is an article resource box? For those who may be some what new to the
field of internet business and article marketing the resource box is the small
biography about the author of the article with a hyperlink to his website. Most
articles have this at the end of the article.
Resource boxes are not a new concept created just for the internet. Magazine
articles have used them for many years. Newspapers have used them also, except
maybe for staff authors. What the internet has done is add the hyperlink to the
resource box.
You can think of it as a bartering exchange. The publisher benefits from the
content being provided by the author, which makes his website more informative
and useful to visitors. The author benefits from the increased exposure that
links back to his website.
So what makes for a good resource box in an article?
The goal is to not be too overwhelming for the publisher. Yet it has to be
effective in drawing the reader to click on the hyperlink and visit your
website. A third but equally important requirement is to consider how the
search engines view your resource box.
1 – From a publisher’s perspective:
I have a website which I use to publish articles from other authors. I don’t
just automatically approve all articles but read them to decide if appropriate.
I’ve learned that one of the first things I do before even reading the article
is to check out the resource box for some obvious issues:
* Is the author’s name included? This indicates ownership and commitment.
* Are there too many hyperlinks? For me, one or two links are desired.
Depending on the links maybe three is appropriate. If it appears the author is
simply greedy and looking for exposure to multiple sites I don’t even bother
with reading the article.
* Does the author say something about himself or about their website or what
they do? One or two sentences are usually appropriate here.
* Follow the hyperlinks and check out the website(s). Is the site completed? Is
it useful and appropriate? The kind of site I would be willing to link to?
These are the resource box attributes I look for before even reading the
article. Again this is my option, but from what I’ve read other publishers look
for similar requirements.
2 – From a visitor or users perspective:
For the reader or potential customer you have only a few sentences to draw them
to click on your website. As mentioned previously, some basic information
usually fulfills this requirement.
The real work for invoking the user’s click on your link is with the article
body itself. If the article content is found to be useful and interesting to
the reader, they are more likely to click on your link. Under these conditions
your resource box simply needs to give them a little guidance to get them
there.
3 – From the search engines perspective:
From the search engine perspective keywords are everything. It is beyond the
scope of this article to detail exactly how keywords are determined. Check out
any popular forum (Google for one) on search engine optimization and you’ll
find plenty of topics about keywords.
Many experts now recommend including the keywords in the anchor text portion of
the hyperlink. The “anchor text” is the portion of the link which is visible to
the user. When the user clicks on the anchor text, the hyperlink directs him to
the website address which is the second part of the hyperlink.
The primary obstacle with using your keywords as the anchor text is that it
requires some html elements to be included when submitting your article to be
published. Many automated web publishing systems automatically strip out any
html elements it finds, which then eliminates your link.
To get around this obstacle authors are submitting two links as part of the
resource box. One is with the html formatting to properly display their
keywords as the anchor text portion of the link and another link with the plain
text version of their website address. This method at least provides a basic
link to their site if the html formatted link is removed.
You are free to copy this article to your site as long as you include the
following resource information with an active link to my site: