ABC Article Directory Blog

A phrase is a group of words without a subject and a conjugated verb; some phrases may have a subject or a conjugated verb, but not both. Each phrase contains a “central” or predominant word or words which are often called the ‘head of the phrase.’

Noun phrases function as subjects, direct object, indirect objects, or objects of prepositions:

My canary is sad.
[My canary is a noun phrase functioning as the subject of the sentence.]

My yellow canary hits high Cs.
[Noun preceded by adjective.]

Dr. Sung pulled Mrs. Kim’s tooth.
[The noun phrases here are proper names.]

The thief stole a computer.
[Nouns preceded by definite and indefinite articles, respectively.]

Our children get along with their teachers.
[Nouns preceded by possessive pronouns.]

The actor with the crooked smile won the Oscar.
[Noun with prepositional phrase.]

Verb phrases include a verb and modifiers and express action or state of being.

Maggie scored the winning goal.
[scored the winning goal is a verb phrase being used as a predicate.]

Your loan has been approved

The economy has tanked.

Adjectival phrases include adjectives that modify a noun or nouns:

Santa Claus wore a dazzling red outfit
[dazzling red are adjectives that modify the noun outfit.] Continue reading »

Being a full-time SEM (Search Engine Marketer) I have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dog (not a pretty picture) to jump every time Google twitches. Lately Google has been doing a lot of twitching.

Specifically, the rather startling news from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa that Google has ditched PageRank from Webmaster Tools.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” states Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” (Source: WebProNews)

Now, for SEO reasons or for ranking in Google’s index, PageRank has long been eunuchified by Google. However, even missing a few dangling bits, history has shown us, eunuchs still wheel tremendous power. PageRank is no different.

Regardless of what Google wants to happen, PageRank is still extremely important to anyone marketing on the web, especially if you’re selling SEO services or operating a web business. Try selling SEO services when that little green bar on your site is pointing to PR0 or worst yet, pointing to a solid gray bar.

Obtaining a high PR7 or PR8 simply means more business and revenues… regardless of how Google is or is not using PageRank. People know how to count and they learned long ago, a ten is a lot more than a big fat zero.

Placed against a PR1 site, a PR8 will win more respect in the eyes of potential clients and can produce enormous profits for the site owner and we won’t even mention the still widely practiced habit of selling links, which Google is desperately trying to stop. Total and full elimination of PageRank would be an honest start but it will still be an uphill, if not an unwinnable battle, for Google to fully eliminate link selling.

Even with my modest sites, I have turned down a small fortune by not selling text links on any of my sites. When I had a PR6 site instead of a PR4 - those link requests were nearly doubled. So one can easily understand Google’s position and the need to downplay PageRank, if they want to put even a small dent in all this link selling and buying, which is still running rampant on today’s web.

PageRank is Google’s creation, and unless they remove it fully from their system and the Google toolbar, then PageRank still Counts. Actually, in the whole scheme of marketing your website on the net, PageRank counts big time. And in more ways than one.

There are several reasons why you shouldn’t count PageRank out. Continue reading »

Last year, Facebook became the Number 1 social networking site in the world, passing up MySpace. As such, it is used extensively for networking, especially amongst online marketers. I use Facebook, along with Twitter and YouTube, as an important piece of my social media strategy. I have made many great contacts on Facebook, and usually log in a couple of times a day.

Early one Sunday morning, I woke up and sleepily wandered into my home office. I had a few messages on Facebook, so I tried logging in, but was shocked to receive this message…

* “Your Facebook account has been disabled for violation of our Terms of Service. If you feel that your account has been wrongly disabled, please click here.”

WHAT!?

My throat got dry. I started getting sweaty. I had made almost 3,000 friends already. Without an account, I would not be able to direct people to my videos, articles, and press releases. I would not be able to network with my contacts. I wouldn’t be able to joke around with my friends! This was NOT good.

I had to do something…QUICKLY. I started sending emails….first to the dispute center, then to the help desk. Eventually, I received an automated email response:

* “We have received your email. We will review your request and get back to you shortly.”

That’s it? Ouch. Well, at least a glimmer of hope. So, I waited a few days. Nothing. So, I waited another few days. Still nothing. This was really beginning to frustrate me.

After some research on Facebook’s site, doing some searches online, and through friends on Twitter, I learned that mine was not an isolated case. Many of the Social Media sites have been disabling accounts. I recently had some friends…fellow marketers, who had their YouTube accounts shut down. You can read about it here: “Playing Nice With YouTube.” Continue reading »

Search engine updates come and go but links remain strong. And it looks like link building is here to stay as the single most powerful SEO tactics. The question is where do you get relevant links that will drive your site up in the search results?

One of the most effective but often overlooked aspects of link building is competitive intelligence. The concept is simple. Find out where your rivals get their links, take over their link sources and blow the big guys out the water. Right now I’m gonna tell you a little secret of how to find links to a website and take advantage of the hidden link sources of your competish. And you’re going to learn how to bypass the search engine’s limit of 1,000 links per site and learn more about the linking profile of any website.

Step 1: The easiest way to find links to a website is to go to Yahoo! and run a search for “link:domain . com” (without quotes and spaces). The “link:” operator is used to get a list of links pointing to a site. Once you hit search you’ll be automatically taken to Yahoo! site explorer where you’ll get a list of links.

Step 2: In the ‘Show links dropdown’ choose ‘except from this domain’ to exclude all the internal links that are of no much use to you unless you’re interested in the navigational structure of your competitor.

Step 3: You can just go through the links in your browser or you can export them by pressing ‘Export first 1,000 results to TSV’ link in the upper right-hand corner and explore them later.

Step 4: Now that you’ve got a list of links you need to weed out the poor quality ones and select the best link sources that you can use for your own website. Continue reading »

Articles have been known to be the driving force in driving traffic to a website. Articles are a factor in giving site elevated rankings in search result pages. The higher a site ranks the bigger slice of the traffic flow pie he gets. With a large number in traffic flow, there are more profits and more potential for other income generating plans as well.

But, it is not just about filling your site with articles; they have specific requirements as well. These requirements must be met to obtain the maximum benefits an article will provide for your site. A nicely written article will catch the eyes and interest of your customers and keep them coming back for more. They would also be able to recommend your site to others.

Here are some tips to help you and help you in writing your articles. Below you will read about four things all articles must have to make it successful and effective in making your site a profit earning and traffic overflowing site.

1. Keywords and Keyword Phrases.

An article should always be centered on the keywords and keyword phrases. As each website visitor goes to a site, there are those who are not just merely browsing but actually looking for a specific something. When this happens, a searcher generally goes to a search engine and types in the keywords they are looking for (e.g. Toyota Camry, Meningitis, Tax Lawyer and Etcetera). It could be anything they want. Continue reading »

OK. The title of this article may be a bit tongue in cheek, since I am a tremendous advocate of Twitter but if you don’t use it correctly, well, it can be just a waste of time.

What Do I Mean?

Twitter is now one of the most popular, or possibly the most popular, social networking website on the internet. Millions of people ‘tweet’ each and every day. If all you want is to find out what strangers are doing on almost a minute by minute basis, that’s fine. But if you ask me, and I know you haven’t, that a waste of time.

What you really need to do is figure out ‘the why’ about your use of Twitter. For many people today the only reason to use Twitter is to promote their online or ‘brick and mortar’ business.

Having thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Followers can be a real head trip but for the most part that is all it is. There is no probability that most of these people have any interest in what you’re saying or doing. Locating targeted followers is critical when working with Twitter. There are numerous tools that can hep you find just such a targeted Twitter audience.

If you are marketing to a world wide audience Twitter is an excellent resource. However, just any audience can still be a waste of time. As mentioned, most businesses have a particular target market or audience. If that is the situation with your business than you need to target your Twitter audience in much the same way you would target a local, warm blooded audience. Continue reading »

Website traffic is monitored through various tools. Many of the best tools are free, but the results may need some interpretation. There are many companies that provide services that monitor and analyze website traffic. There are also ways for website owners to learn to perform this service themselves.

It may take a while to learn, but it is a worthy investment, especially if a website owner is serious about growing the traffic to his or her site. There are many reasons to analyze website traffic. One of the biggest reasons is that it gives site owners a way to monitor the effectiveness of their site. If, for example, a website is registering 3,000 hits during a two-day span, it sounds like the website is doing reasonably well.

On closer examination, however, the owner sees that the visitors are only staying a minute, and are not looking at the other content on the site. Now, the owner can try to solve the problem, and find ways to encourage the visitors to stay longer. Increasing website traffic takes time, luck, and skill. For any one topic, there may be a million or more web pages devoted to it. In order to get traffic to one particular site, the owner needs to know how to get his or her content noticed.

Website traffic is no different, you must continue to offer some great giveaways and more information for your visitors. This will make it easier for contacting them and telling them about more of your special offers. As you see, the sources for free web traffic are many and they can become valid contributions to your online business prosperity, if you are willing to pay the price of work, time and dedication.

Website traffic is by using a traffic exchange. Submit it to a few article directories, and you’ll get some readers. If they like it, some will even take it and use it on their websites, creating valuable one-way links. Meanwhile, some readers will like it enough to want more, and they’ll click that link in your resource or “about the author” box at the end of the article.

Website traffic is to register your website with the major search engines. But all your efforts can go in vain if the content of your website is not fully optimized. We provide you customized seo services which are highly key word oriented suiting your needs and requirements. We focus on increasing the amount, quality, and relevance of your website content, and on increasing the popularity of your site by having other sites link to your site.

The more people “in the market” that your message reaches,. So how do you ensure that hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of your potential customers come to your website? Website traffic is to use pay-per-click (ppc) services such as google adwords, or yahoo or a host of other pay services. You also need to know what you’re doing or you could find yourself spending lots of money, getting poor results and losing money very quickly.

Also, when you’re first starting out, you have a limited budget, and starting with ppc campaigns may not even be an option for you at this point in time. Free traffic exchanges can be a great way to get traffic to your website. You should also know there’s really no such thing as free because you must spend your time surfing through other websites to earn credits.

Free traffic exchanges are a great way to get lots of visitors to your site however, so spending an hour a day surfing, is not a lot to ask if you’re making sales from your efforts. And isn’t this why your in this business to begin with? Free traffic exchanges are a great marketing tool for a many reasons. The best reason is that you get lots of people looking, and hopefully clicking on your website or promotional pages.

But there are hidden benefits to free traffic exchanges you may not have even considered. Search engines love free traffic exchanges because of all the incoming and outgoing links they generate. Plus the rapidly changing content is another reason the search engines love traffic exchanges. Exchanges that have more content also generate a higher page rank, and therefore more traffic, and increased memberships. Continue reading »

After shutting down the article submissions page for the Labor Day weekend, the abcarticledirectory.com is back in business with a vengeance. Notices were posted about the shutdown but unfortunately, a few individuals didn’t get the message. There were still a few emails from some members needing reassurances that we had not shut down permanently. Have no fear, we are still here.

It seems that Google blew a fuse or two  for a period of about 36 hours as traffic went crashing down approximately 70% over that period. As of today, search engine traffic levels have gradually risen to average highs and the trend seems to have stabilized. The Labor Day weekend did not do much for traffic levels but then again, I was up in a cottage for three days and didn’t look at a computer screen the whole time.

The article directory continues to rise in popularity as more and more authors sign up to submit their articles in the hope of getting traffic to their own sites. We are currently receiving well over one hundred new signups a day with well over 500 articles daily. Unfortunately, far too few members take the time to read the submission guidelines and have their articles declined.

One of the major reasons for declined articles is the length of the article. Articles must have a minimum of 500 words before they are even looked at. Anything under 500 words is deleted automatically by a script. The next major reasons for article rejection are the odd tendency authors have of embedding links in the body of the article and not submitting titles in “Title Case”.

The latest article has a tag of #557511, which means that there have been 557,511 articles submitted to the directory so far. We have 127,929 approved articles so far. That means that approximately 75% of all articles submitted have been rejected for one reason or another. Author members need to pay attention to detail. There is no point in submitting a bushel full of articles in the hope that one might get approved. It is a complete waste of time. Nobody is going to read a bad article on the abc article directory and go to your site to read more bad articles. A quick look at the amount of traffic that the “most popular articles”  achieve should be a standard for most authors to aspire to duplicate.

We have been tinkering with the site’s html, in an effort to optimize it for faster page loading. This is an ongoing process that should take a couple of days to complete. Hopefully, all our members will reap the rewards of faster page loading and hopefully, more traffic.We have also tweaked a few scripts…removing some…adjusting others.

All in all, things are going very well (knock on wood) and the article directory is definitely a force in the web publishing world. Keep signing up submitting those great articles. Your reward will be higher traffic and recognition as an expert in your field. Remember to complete your profile page. You can upload a picture of yourself, create a bio  and submit up to 5 links.

Do you want to make your articles better and more powerful? Do you want your articles to be read thereby increasing your income? Are you a ghostwriter who would like to make more money by writing and selling their articles online? There are several points listed below that answer these questions.

Here’s how you can make your articles more impacting and more powerful:

1. Create a working title. Start writing your articles by having a working title. This is something that you can change later on. This will help you limit the scope of your content and make your articles more focused.

2. Create an outline. List down the things that you would like to include in your articles and the angle that you would like to focus on. Then, include the supporting details and elements that you are going to use to make your articles interesting to read.

3. Relax. Keep in mind that you don’t need to sound like a college professor when writing your articles just to earn the trust of your target market. In fact, you can give your online users great reading experience if you write your articles using conversational tone. Make them sound like you are directly talking to your readers.

4. Make it easy to understand. You do not want to cause confusion, right? So, use short sentences and short paragraphs. Also, substitute big words with the simplest terms. Then, use subheadings and bullet list to make your content highly scannable. If you really need to use highly technical terms, make sure that you define them first using lay man’s terms. Continue reading »

IBM’s X-Force 2009 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report says that there has been a tremendous increase of 508% in malicious web links over Internet during first half of 2009. The malicious content was found even on trusted sites, including search engines, blogs, bulletin boards, personal websites, online magazines, and mainstream news sites.

“There is no such thing as safe browsing today and it is no longer the case that only the red light district sites are responsible for malware. We’ve reached a tipping point where every Web site should be viewed as suspicious and every user is at risk. The threat convergence of the Web ecosystem is creating a perfect storm of criminal activity,” says X-Force Director Kris Lamb.

“The trends seem to reveal a fundamental security weakness in the Web ecosystem where interoperability between browsers, plugins, content, and server applications dramatically increase the complexity and risk. Criminals are taking advantage of the fact that there is no such thing as a safe browsing environment and are leveraging insecure Web applications to target legitimate Web site users.”

Highlights of the report include:

Vulnerabilities rate decreases by 8%
The number of new vulnerability disclosures in the first half of 2009 was 3,240, an eight percent decrease over the first half of 2008. This is at the lowest level in the past four years. The number of new, high severity vulnerability disclosures is down by nearly 30 percent in comparison to 2008. Sun replaces Microsoft as the top spot of vendor with the most vulnerability disclosures. When it comes to OS vulnerabilities, Sun Solaris surpassed Apple in terms of new OS disclosures. Continue reading »