yfs1 is an experienced webmaster and prolific forum poster who has recently started a new article submission site, http://www.ArticleDepot. Within just a few weeks he is receiving hundreds of new articles and also many hundreds of visitors each day. Below are his answers to questions we put to him on June 3rd, 2005.
What is
philosophy of your organisation?
The main goal for Article Depot is to provide a two-pronged resource for webmasters. The first is a place where they can distribute their articles and gain SEO benefit of links contained within. The second is to provide them with related and useful content to supplement their site and gain greater exposure. We combine these two things with a "Keep It Simple" philosophy. There are no confusing signups or new code to learn. Most article submissions take less than 20 seconds from start to finish.
What are organisation's plans and goals?
Our goal is to become a leading article distribution site by constantly adding new features that benefit people that make Article Depot what it is, webmasters.
What do you consider to your site's strengths and weaknesses?
Our strength is our ability to adapt. We always have features in development. Our biggest one right now is to have an RSS feed which webmasters can put on their site and display articles in their chosen category as they are submitted. This would mean they could have fresh content and wouldn't even have to come to site. Our weakness may be our passion for this type of site. We are always trying to see things through webmasters eyes which can be difficult when you have level of involvement with a site that we do.
What made you decide to run an article site?
I am a webmaster myself and I saw a need for a certain kind of article site. I struggled to find it so at first decided to build one to meet my own needs. It has now taken off with over 2,000 submissions every two weeks and unique visitors increasing 10% a day. I believe in it and feel it's future of SEO. Content will always be important and can often help protect you from Algo shifts.
As owner of ArticleDepot, what do you find to be some of your biggest challenges?
By far biggest challenge we face is SPAM. With any distribution site, most times you are judged on value of your site by quality of articles. This is why each article is viewed by a human reviewer before being added. This ensures quality of our database and ensures you are getting quality you expect when you come to Article Depot.
Do you think that content is still king?
I still believe in Content as King in an overall sense. Most SEO's these days have taken to phrase “Links are King, Content Is Queen” but I would disagree. I don't disagree for a moment that links are essential and important, especially with Google. What I would argue is that if content is used correctly it can excel in places links can't. The sandbox is a prime example. No matter how many links you manage to get, it is unlikely you will be able to escape sandbox. However, by using content during this time, you can actually rank for 1000's of less competitive keywords that aren't held by sandbox. Many times those 1000's together bring in significantly more traffic than one competitive keyword.
