Unit of 1 - Publishing Articles on your Website - How Should They be Formatted?

A question from the Unit of 1 Yahoo Group discussion forum:

When posting articles on your own website, what is the general rule of thumb on the best way to format them?

Should they be in PDF, Flash, or something else?

What do other people do with articles?

Andrea Michalek responded with:
My advice is if you're putting articles on your website, you should have them accessible in plain old HTML. If you want to offer a PDF version for nicely formatted printing, that's great, but at a minimum, the article should be in HTML.

The main reason I feel this way is that articles you author help to define and defend your expertise. If you can get these articles in front of potential clients - that's perfect. One of the great things about publishing articles is that search engine spiders will crawl your site and index that content. Then, when users search for keywords that are in your article, they'll be drawn into your site through the articles you've written. By publishing articles around your area of expertise regularly, you'll be able to not only establish yourself as an expert in your field, but also be casting a wide net with which to capture search engine traffic.

One thing to note here is that when new users find out about you through this mechanism, they are not coming to your website through your homepage. They're landing in your site directly on the article page. Thus, it's important, even within your own site, to include a brief bio at the bottom of each article. Even better, place the call to action that you want them to do at the bottom of each article. For example, if you want them to sign up for your newsletter, put it there.

Also, you'll want to make sure that you have a way for the user to navigate to all of the other main areas of your website from your article pages.