by: Trey Pennewell
As a publisher of ezines and newsletters, you know that customers always want more from your services. One way to provide customers a good service while increasing your search engine rankings is to place your ezine archives online. By placing these online you are giving your readers a value added service that will set you apart from other ezines and newsletters. Not only will this provide value to your customers, but also by placing your archives online, the search engine spiders are able to "see" your unique combination of content. Ultimately, having your ezine archives online will give you higher search rankings and additional keyword phrase variations that everyone so desperately wants.
There are some things to consider when putting your archives online. The first consideration is whether or not your ezine model is a paid subscription or a free subscription. If your ezine is a pay subscription, you probably do not want to place all of your archives online where someone can access them for free. If you were to do this there would be no need for readers to actually pay for a subscription. However, you may want to consider placing a couple of archived issues on a website so that potential customers and advertisers can see what it is your publication has to offer them. Then you can keep the remaining archives in a member's only website that is only accessible to your paying subscribers.
If you offer a free ezine or newsletter, there is little reason not to offer all of your archives for free online. The reason that people will want to go ahead and subscribe to your ezine or newsletter is that they can get the issue as soon as it comes out. You may want to consider only offering archives online that are at least a few months old. In other words, do not offer this month's issue in the archive for a few more months, so that people will still want to subscribe to your publication to see it when it is first made available.
Search engine spiders love content on websites. Not only do spiders like the generic content, but they really like valuable content such as articles. Quality content is one of the primary things that search engines look for when providing rankings and the level of importance of a website. The articles that are included in your archive will boost your search engine ranking. Having a higher search engine ranking means that potential subscribers are able to find you much easier. Being easy to find and offering a service such as free ezine with archives gives potential subscribers many reasons to choose your ezine or newsletter to land in their email box over your competitors.
Having your publications placed in an online archive will automatically provide you with a good amount of keyword optimization. For example, if you are publishing an ezine that mainly talks about home improvement, there is a high likelihood that many of the articles in your publication will contain the words "home improvement". Now when a potential subscriber searches on the Internet for "home improvement," they are much more likely to be directed to your website and learn that you provide a valuable subscription on this very topic. If you do not have your archives online, chances of picking up these new visitors and subscribers are greatly diminished.
Simply put, having your ezine archives online is probably the easiest way to increase your search engine optimization and the easiest way to increase your ezine's subscriber base for free. It is very inexpensive to provide your archives online, and it can improve your subscriber's experience letting him or her feel good about the service that you are providing to them.
People may have a desire to read your publication, but your ezine can easily get overlooked due to the excessive number of publications currently arriving in the subscriber's email box. A day will come when an individual feels overwhelmed by the number of publications arriving in their mailbox each day or week. When this starts to happen, they start canceling subscriptions because it is simply too much hassle to go through and delete these newsletters and ezines every week or every month. I have found myself in that position, so I eliminated the ones that bored me and only kept one or two subscriptions that really seemed to offer me the quality content that I wanted in an easy to read format. It was getting to be annoying to go through my email on a regular basis to filter out the excess ezines and newsletters that I did not read anyway.
So if you want to set yourself apart from your competitors and offer a value added service to your customers, you seriously need to consider placing your archives online. It is likely that you will be surprised at the change in your search engine rankings as well. Again, if you provide a pay subscription consider offering a few issues in a free archive so that you can show potential subscribers and advertisers the quality of the product you provide.