People access the internet seeking free information and they expect that information to benefit them in some way. Useful free information can lead to purchases by your website visitors. It is in your best interest to provide such information. Know that this type of informational marketing must be done with well-written, relevant, and optimized content articles. When you provide free information to your customers you are providing a sought after service. Additionally, you can demonstrate that you are a well informed source on the topic matter at hand. When applied properly, your articles will place well in the search engines because your articles are considered relevant to search inquiries. Keeping your content fresh will get the continued attention of the search engines. It’ll keep your customers coming back too. Websites that offer fresh, constantly updated, relevant information optimized for key words usually rank high with the search engines. This is how the search engines are designed to work. Consider that search engine spiders are constantly seeking new information. They index and catalog what they find adding anything new they discover as they collect data. They utilize the information on your site to determine how relevant it is to the search inquiries they serve which is reflected in your website’s page rank. In simple terms, the search engines will catalog and index the pages on your site for commonly mentioned words and phrases. Please note that these words and phrases are scrutinized according to percentages. Redundant keyword or phrase use is considered key word stuffing and results in a penalty. It’s a kin to spam. The search engines like naturally occurring organic use of keywords and phrases. When an inquiry is made for a search term, such as “quick and easy gourmet dinner recipes” for example, the engines will reference their database for websites containing that particular phrase and display what they consider to be relevant results. A website that exclusively features “quick and easy gourmet meals”, contains volumes of information on this topic and is constantly updated with fresh subject matter content gets the competing edge over other websites offering similar information. Remember, the content must be relevant and useful to your visitor and distinguishable to the search engines without over doing it. Many website owners make the mistake of creating content for the spiders that are crawling the website for data. They do not take into consideration that most visitors will determine within 5 seconds whether or not the information presented is worth reading. People are attracted to ease. Make Your website experience easy for them. Pages should download fast. Information should be easy to find. It should also be easy to comprehend in addition to being useful to them. Keep you information fresh. Keep your paragraphs short. Avoid distracting graphics. Use bullets and make your information scanable. Help your customer find what they are looking for easily and quickly. Remember the most valuable customer you have is your repeat customer. Give them a reason to keep coming back. Constantly added new information will do wonders for you and your customers. You want to avoid the “been there, done that, next” response on the part of your website visitors as well as the search engines. You can also use reciprocal linking in your website content. Considering that most people surf the web going from one interesting link to another. You can get “lateral” traffic by creating a mutually beneficial linking arrangement with other topic related websites. Let’s say your website specializes in “quick and easy gourmet dinner recipes”. Could you contact a webmaster who owns a website that specializes in “fast low calorie desert recipes” and arrange to make some of the content on each website refer to the other? In essence you would be serving your customers better and helping each other increase website visits. As you can see, providing useful information to your website visitor is what the internet is really about. Utilize this principle to help convert more of your website visits into purchases and repeat visits from your customers and the search engines.