Part Time Work at Home Opportunities
Is Your Resource Box Right For Your Article?
By Craig RitsemaWhat is an article resource box? It is a small biography about the author of an article, and usually also contains a hyperlink to his website. Most the time, these appear at the ends of articles.
Resource boxes are not a new concept created just for the Internet. Magazine articles have used them for many years. Newspapers have used them as well, although perhaps not for staff writers. The Internet has added 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, but it has to encourage the reader to click on the hyperlink and visit the author’s website. It’s equally important to consider how the search engines view your resource box.
1 – From a publisher’s perspective:
I have a website that 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, perhaps three in some cases. If it appears the author is simply greedy and looking for exposure to multiple sites, I don’t even bother to read the article.
* Does the author say something about himself, his website, or what he does? 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 as I understand it, 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 encourage them to click on your website. As mentioned previously, some basic information usually fulfills this requirement.
The real work in getting the user to click is with the article body itself. If the article content is useful and interesting to the reader, he or she is more likely to click on your link. In this case, your resource box simply needs to give them a little guidance to get them to do so.
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 that 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 in using your keywords as the anchor text is that it requires you to include some html elements when you submit 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.
About the Author:
Craig Ritsema operates a successful part time home business and resides in Michigan, USA. For more details visit his site at: http://www.part-time-work-at-home-opportunities.com