How to Create a Resource Box for Your Article

by Craig Ritsema

Published on this site: September 9th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

What is an article resource box? For those who may be some what new to the field of internet business and article marketing the resource box is the small biography about the author of the article with a hyperlink to his website. Most articles have this at the end of the article.

Resource boxes are not a new concept created just for the internet. Magazine articles have used them for many years. Newspapers have used them also, except maybe for staff authors. What the internet has done is add the hyperlink to the resource box.

You can think of it as a bartering exchange. The publisher benefits from the content being provided by the author, which makes his website more informative and useful to visitors. The author benefits from the increased exposure that links back to his website.

So what makes for a good resource box in an article?

The goal is to not be too overwhelming for the publisher. Yet it has to be effective in drawing the reader to click on the hyperlink and visit your website. A third but equally important requirement is to consider how the search engines view your resource box.

1. From a publisher's perspective:
   
   I have a website which I use to publish articles from other authors. I don't just automatically approve all articles but read them to decide if appropriate.
   
   I've learned that one of the first things I do before even reading the article is to check out the resource box for some obvious issues:
   
   
   • Is the author's name included? This indicates ownership and commitment.
     
     
   • Are there too many hyperlinks? For me, one or two links are desired. Depending on the links maybe three is appropriate. If it appears the author is simply greedy and looking for exposure to multiple sites I don't even bother with reading the article.
     
     
   • Does the author say something about himself or about their website or what they do? One or two sentences are usually appropriate here.
     
     

   • Follow the hyperlinks and check out the website(s). Is the site completed? Is it useful and appropriate? The kind of site I would be willing to link to?

   These are the resource box attributes I look for before even reading the article. Again this is my option, but from what I've read other publishers look for similar requirements.
   

2. From a visitor or users perspective:
   
   For the reader or potential customer you have only a few sentences to draw them to click on your website. As mentioned previously, some basic information usually fulfills this requirement.
   
   The real work for invoking the user's click on your link is with the article body itself. If the article content is found to be useful and interesting to the reader, they are more likely to click on your link. Under these conditions your resource box simply needs to give them a little guidance to get them there.

3. From the search engines perspective:
   
   From the search engine perspective keywords are everything. It is beyond the scope of this article to detail exactly how keywords are determined. Check out any popular forum (Google for one) on search engine optimization and you'll find plenty of topics about keywords.
   
   Many experts now recommend including the keywords in the anchor text portion of the hyperlink. The "anchor text" is the portion of the link which is visible to the user. When the user clicks on the anchor text, the hyperlink directs him to the website address which is the second part of the hyperlink.
   
   The primary obstacle with using your keywords as the anchor text is that it requires some html elements to be included when submitting your article to be published. Many automated web publishing systems automatically strip out any html elements it finds, which then eliminates your link.

To get around this obstacle authors are submitting two links as part of the resource box. One is with the html formatting to properly display their keywords as the anchor text portion of the link and another link with the plain text version of their website address. This method at least provides a basic link to their site if the html formatted link is removed.

Craig Ritsema: operates a successful part time home business and resides in Michigan, USA. For more details visit his site at:
http://www.part-time-work-at-home-opportunities.com