Webmaster Interview : Thomas Jenkins

Thomas Jenkins is an upcoming article writer who recently decided to run his own article submission site, www.WebDesignArticles.info

Below are excerpts from an interview he kindly gave us about his site, which he began at the beginning of March, 2005

Are backlinks from your site SEO friendly?
Indeed, we also try to use key words as the anchor text for links to author's site, our research shows this helps with ranking.

What is the philosophy of your organisation?
We endeavour to provide a comprehensive resource for webmasters, supplying them with up to the minute articles and resources.

What do you consider to be your site's strengths and weaknesses?
A strength of our site is that it has articles on a range of topics, from a number of experts. Also, everything on our site is free. The weakness is that authors have to submit their site via email, this is a weakness we will be fixing soon, along with a new, sleeker look and many more tools and articles.

What are the organisation's plans and goals?
Our plan is to update the site design, making it easier to use and more organised structurally. Our goal is to become the number 1 web article site. The place authors go to first to submit their articles and the place where readers go first for web research.

What are some of the challenges you face as a site owner?
We face the same challenges as other article sites, there is a lot of competition out there. However, I see this as a good thing, it drives us to ensure our site remains top quality. We don't want to be left behind, we want to lead the field. A challenge a little more specific to webdesignarticles.info is the extension '.info', users aren't as familiar with this as some of the others like .com and .co.uk - we hope this is something we can overcome, as our site is an info site, so it is logical.

Is content still king?
Absolutely, but it increasingly has to share its thrown with things like quality links and keyword density. However, in my opinion, there is no point having a site that ranks high if the content is useless. People will simply click that little X at the top right of their screen.

How do you ensure that the quality of your content remains high?
This is one of our top priorities, quality content is what drives our website. That is why I personally approve every article submitted to us before adding it to the site.

What is your favourite web article to date?
Haha, this is going to sound far to immodest, but its the truth. My favourite articles are 'The @kins Diet' and 'Google: Internet Democracy?' Both by me. I am just really proud of how they turned out and how readers responded to them.

What are your tips for writing a good article?
You should write about something you know inside out but in a way you possibly have not explored before. Try to be unique but do NOT go against conventional wisdom just for the sake of it, try and back things up with research.

What are your best 3 tips for gaining inbound links?
Number 1 has to be create a quality website that people want to link to. Other than that you should write articles and submit to article sites. Also submit to directories.

Why should someone submit their article to your site first?
If they submit to our site first, their article will get plenty of exposure, as we feature new and quality articles. Furthermore, as we have some quite well know authors writing for us, outsider article site content developers use our site to draw content from.

Why do you run an article site?
I write articles myself and decided that the logical step was to set an article site. I love running my article site because of the feedback and encouragement i get from our readers. Most people submit articles to gain links to their sites.

What other benefits, if any, do you see from posting articles to your site?
The reason i started writing articles was to give something back to the online community. When i was starting out I learned a lot from online articles written by experts - I wanted to help others with the knowledge i had gained. On a less altruistic note, writing articles gives you credibility, it shows that you know what you are doing, it helps show people that you are an expert in your field. I have people that have contacted me, specifically requesting my content development services because they liked the articles i write.

Upcoming interviews :

1. yfs1, article and directory site owner, popular poster on forums.digitalpoint.com
2. Googlest.com, recently featured on TV