Getting traffic from articles linked from your home page

I own a fairly high ranking web site for the keywords I'm targeting. Now a few years ago, I had a similar site in the same industry and found I was able to get a good amount of traffic by writing articles relating to my main topic and then linking back to my home page.

The articles are written based upon keyword research (good ratio of searches to competition), and then I write the articles 100% originally and actually try to give the person searching what they are looking for (completely white hat, just optimized for the keyword I'm targeting.). Now when doing this many years ago I had incredible success. That could very well be because the times have changed, and I might be getting penalized somehow for targeting these individual domains (though it isn't obvious at first).

So my question is, what methods would you use to target these more niched keywords branched off from your main site. All the URLs right now are in the form of: /niche_keyword_here.html, and are linked off the home page (PR5) and an articles page (PR5). All the articles are ranking terribly, even though the homepage is doing great for some really tough keywords.

Should I try to get inbound links to each individual article? Is this even a valid method any longer?

Sorry for all the questions, I've just been a bit frustrated after putting all this time into a completely white-hat method and getting no results.

Thanks.

Yes, assuming you're not over optimizing your articles, it sounds like you need more backlinks. Internal links are rarely enough - you need to get proper external backlinks to your deep pages, especially with the correct anchor text of the keyword you're targeting on each page.

Also make sure you've got a good internal linking structure and a sitemap. There are all kinds of indexing / backlinking strategies you can use, like making an RSS feed of your latest articles and submitting it to RSS directories - just search around and do some reading.

If your main page is PR5 it's highly unlikely your domain is penalized.

Thanks, that's what I was thinking regarding getting more inbound links. I was basically taking a model that worked very well in the past, and copying it over to this site a few years later (though this site is 5 years old as well).

I've done quite a bit of back linking stuff in the past, but I have around 50 articles. Is there any relatively simple way of getting links targeting all the individual pages?

My idea with this site was to build it up 100% clean & white hat for a few years on the side, and then really start to push it after it is established... So I'm not averse to black/gray hat methods.

If you've got real articles that you put real work in to, I would actually be quite wary of using BH tactics - you run the risk of wasting all that effort if you get banned.

In this day and age I would go for submitting your article to social bookmarking sites (various progs out there to do this auto or semi-auto) and pushing the site through social networking (especially Twitter).

Other options off the top of my head include:

Light gray:
* Facebook / fan pages
* Link to site / articles from web 2.0 sites, squidoo lens etc
* Make "link wheels"
* Relevant comments on d0follow blogs in your niche
* Article marketing
* Press releases if appropriate
* Directory submissions / RSS feed submissions
* Pinging each new article and your backlinks
* Try sliding some links into wikipedia

Darker gray / black:
* profile backlinks / xrumer blasts
* bulk forum spam / signature links
* full on automated comment spam
* spamming other CMSs eg. wikis

There's no single answer... You just have to work out a workable strategy that works for you based on your time / resources / risk aversion.

One thing to try is looking up your competition's backlinks in yahoo site explorer, and seeing what they're doing for backlinks - then clone / improve that strategy.

Thanks for the advice Autumn, it's appreciated!

From time to here things have changed with increasing competition in the search engines and everything is more difficult. But again you can bring traffic to your articlesdo a good SEO.

Autumn well explained above. My tip is to do only quality backlinks even if you've beenpenalized.

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