It is surprising just how many article marketers spend a great deal of time and effort writing highly optimised articles for submission to directories whilst almost entirely ignoring the content that’s sitting on their own website. Often the assumption seems to be that as long as the articles are doing their job the traffic will come and the sales will follow.

The truth, however, is somewhat different because one of the factors which the search engines take into account when assessing the value of links is the quality of the site to which they are linking.

This is why a poorly developed, poorly optimised website will struggle to achieve visibility within the search results no matter how many articles are submitted linking back to it, whereas an effectively optimised website will benefit much more from each backlink. This is a fact that some article marketers fail to appreciate, and at their cost.

One of the problems which some article marketers find when considering optimisation on their own site is the fact that their flashy design doesn’t allow them much space for content. Their physical page structure and graphics take up so much room that if they included a few hundred words of text providing real value, content and information they would have to sacrifice some of the flashy icons, bouncing banners, embedded video and 400 pixel high graphical titles and navigation buttons.

There are however a few ways round this sort of problem, and if it really is important enough to conserve the space on your web page, then here are a couple of tips for including optimised content on your web page without taking up as much space as 600 odd words of text might otherwise.

The first suggestion is to use a ‘read more’ feature. This involves writing an initial ‘teaser’ section of text, underneath which is a link to ‘read more’. However, rather than taking the reader away from the web page, it simply expands the text to reveal the remaining text. This is achieved using a special DIV tag which hides the text until the link is clicked. A search for ‘HTML hidden text’ on Google offers a whole variety of ways this can be achieved very simply. The benefit of this method is that whilst the initial appearance of the page is not dominated by text, the search engines still see all of the text, ensuring more effective optimisation.

A second way of including more text on the page than might at first be apparent is by using a scrolling frame, such as a scrolling iframe. Some people frown at the idea of using frames, stating that Google can’t read content in frames and that therefore this will count against any optimisation. This is somewhat laughable, since if Google was that technologically backward that it was stumped by the use of a simple frame it wouldn’t have stood any chance of achieving the global status it has.

Using either of these methods will enable you to include more optimised text on your page without having to sacrifice space on your page or the initial layout of your web page’s contents.