Keep your SEO goals in mind while creating your content writing strategy

Jan 28, 2010 Comments

It doesn’t help if you already have lots of content and then you realize that you are not targeting the right keywords. Although no situation is hopeless you can save yourself lots of time, and money, if you define your SEO goals properly. Make a list of keywords and keyword phrases you’d like to incorporate and then start generating your content around them.

There is also a business benefit of clearly defining your SEO goals — it keeps you focused. You know what sort of content you require for your website and blog and what you should avoid; yes, misplaced content is bad for SEO.

How do you keep your content SEO-focused?

• Create titles with your keywords. Your page titles are very important. They appear in the search engine result pages as hyperlinks when people search for the relevant terms. People click more on the links that carry the search terms they’ve just used. Even when people promote your content on social networking websites or link your your pages and blog posts they normally copy/paste your title — this associates these keywords with your brand.
• Use your keywords and key phrases when communicating your ideas. This tells the search engines that you have lots of content associated with the search term being currently used. If you provide content writing services then you should be talking about this subject a lot on your blog or website. But do it naturally; there is no need to use your relevant keywords excessively — this gets you penalized by almost all search engines.
• Link to your other pages not just the home page. Your different pages contain different bits of information and whenever you feel a particular phrase can be linked to a page giving more information about that phrase, create a link. It makes it easier for the search engine crawlers to reach other pages and it also creases the relevancy of your less prominent pages.

The basic idea of creating SEO-focused content strategy is keeping you focused and help you focus on the right search terms.

Why your website or blog needs unique content

Sep 04, 2009 Comments

There are basically two reasons why your website or blog needs unique, fresh content: the search engines prefer unique content compared to commonly and easily found content, and people who are active on various social media and networking websites prefer to promote something unique, something highly useful and something that attracts immediate attention.

Search engines looking for unique content

Various search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! are constantly competing with each other. Just because they get millions of visitors daily don’t assume they have it easy. Even a small fluctuation means millions of ad dollars lost. So they are constantly trying to improve their ranking algorithms and trying to find and index content that is unique.

The uniqueness and the usefulness of the content they find for their users keep those users from switching over to another search engine. Why would the users use a search engine that finds the same stuff that can be found on scores of other websites? Hence, in order to get higher rankings you have to make sure that the content published on your website or blog is unique as well as highly relevant.

Social media users want to promote unique content

Nobody likes to promote content that is being promoted by 500 other users. Social media websites can bring you tons of traffic if you can lure their users to your website by providing highly interesting, topical and relevant content that they cannot find anywhere else. But do they promote your links just for altruistic reasons? Not at all.

Take for instance Twitter and Facebook. Why do people keep posting interesting links on these websites? They want to show that they can locate and share interesting stuff. They want to be useful to their followers and fans. This way, if they are posting 10 useful links from other websites and blogs, they can also post a few from their own website without looking spammy. Besides, on Twitter, interesting tweets get retweeted and this is beneficial both to the owner of the link and the one who tweets it because both gain exposure.

Then there is conventional logic too. When you publish useful content on your website it tells your visitors that you take pains to keep them informed. If you share important information with them you establish yourself as an authority, and in more than 99% cases authority brings respect and trust, and respect and trust leads to loyal customers and clients.

Engaging your readers with interactive content

Jun 11, 2009 Comments

Interactive content doesn’t always have to be animation or video; even your text content can be interactive.

On the Internet, especially these days, we are always in conversations, whether on Twitter, or FaceBook, or on different blogs. Content on social media websites is engaging. We read, we provide feedback, we react, we respond, we present a counter-argument; we like it when people talk to us instead of talking at us. We no longer live on solitary islands of the World Wide Web. We want to feel a part of whatever is going on. Even when we’re simply lurking, we immediately feel like responding when someone talks to us or talks about something we feel passionate about.

Unconsciously, we are looking for an identical experience of interactivity wherever we go. We like it when we are expected to react, and that’s why blogs became such a hit. They became a network of conversations. Reacting to an opinion or a news became as easy as firing up your favorite blogging software and publishing your thoughts, and if not, at least leaving your comments on the blog or the news page.

But how do you make your content engaging when you’re writing a company’s corporate page? Given the preferred turgid style followed by various corporate copywriters and content writers, I know it’s not easy to convince people, but this is something you have to do. Even when you’re writing for a company website, talk to your readers. Write as if you are addressing to them, as if you know what bothers them. Present them with a solution rather than a product or service.

Increase your sales and conversion rate by writing useful content

May 30, 2009 Comments

Content doesn’t just mean text full of numbers and hypothetical statements. It needs to solve a purpose, your visitors and prospects must find it useful. After all people don’t visit your website or blog out of some altruistic reason — they are always looking for something, whether it is information or entertainment. If they don’t find your content useful, if it doesn’t appeal to them, they are going to leave your website quickly without doing business with you, and they are never going to come back if they remember you or your website. Whenever somebody visit’s your website, he or she is thinking, "What’s in there for me?"

But how do you make your content useful; how do you make it cater to a particular need? It’s very simple — by putting your visitors’ interest first. This may seem like a cliché beaten to pulp by various "copywriting experts" but you know what, consider it a miracle, but it really works. Whenever you are creating content for your website, or whenever you are getting it written, keep in mind what you can offer in the best manner and how it can help your visitors. A few days ago I wrote about instilling confidence and trust with your copy. If your visitors can trust you and have confidence in what you have to say they are not apprehensive when they have to purchase a product or service from you. This trustworthiness can be established by encouraging your visitors to come to your website again and again, and this can only be achieved by providing something extremely useful and informative, and on a regular basis. Once trust is established they buy from you even if you don’t ask them to and simply mention that you offer a particular product or service.

Every product or service has a niche market and people are constantly looking for useful information.  Let us assume that you sell an accounting software. Instead of mentioning on every second page of your website or blog how great an account package you’ve got, you can publish interesting trivia about your product. Recognize your market and generate content accordingly.  If you are targeting small businesses with not much knowledge about accounting and bookkeeping you can publish lots of tips and tutorials on how to easily maintain books with your accounting software.  You can also talk about various accounting procedures and how your software tackles them. You can publish objective reviews of other accounting software products so that people can compare and make educated decisions. You can also publish cheatsheets that make it easier to use your software. Sky is the limit when it comes to creating useful content around your product.

The same goes for a service that you provide. Take for example my online content writing service. You may think what is the use of publishing content that helps others become better content writers and online copywriters? When  I am sharing my knowledge and experience I am establishing my authority. I agree…90% of my visitors must just be coming to learn content writing and copywriting, and I’m really glad, and humbled, that I can teach them something, but the remaining 10% can see how much I know about content writing. By going through various pages and blog posts  they can make out that I can improve their conversion rate as well as search engine rankings by my writing experience.  I may not be one of the best writers on the Internet but I definitely know what I’m doing and I abundantly share that on my website.

By constantly generating highly useful content I also increase my chances of getting linked to by other Webmasters and bloggers and consequently, increase traffic and search engine rankings.

Creating useful and valuable content may seem like an uphill task in the beginning but you will find in the end that it is genuinely rewarding. You increase your goodwill, you strengthen your brand, and you encourage people to pay close attention to what you’re saying and offering.

The value of your content in the context of social media

May 27, 2009 Comments

There was a time when in order to promote your content you had to focus on search engines and external links. Even today both these entities matter a lot but there is a third force that could prove to be far more penetrating when it comes to distributing your content: social media.

Some prominent examples of social media are blogging, Twitter.com, FaceBook.com, Ning.com, Youtube.com, Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com. Some of these are interactive tools and some are social bookmarking and recommendation websites but their basic function is helping people promote and generate content.

The compelling reason for having great content, and lots of it

These days it is an aberration if an organization or a professional individual providing services on the Internet does not publish a blog. A blog helps you communicate with your audience unhindered by geographical and technological barriers. Blogging has almost become a “traditional” content publishing platform as many people are quickly switching over to micro-blogging. Nevertheless, blogging still rules when it comes to publishing and promoting content; in fact most of the links being promoted on the social media and bookmarking websites belong to blogs.

So what is the value of your content in the context of social media and what all should you consider while creating and publishing content? It is very similar to creating a viral marketing campaign.

Your content on social media websites thrives upon the users’ tendency to recommend interesting and relevant links to their followers and friends. In fact some users produce no original content; they simply forward and promote other links with their own comments sprinkled here and there.

There are two interesting features of users active on social media websites:

• They promote content
• They discuss content

In order to leverage the power of social media, first of all you have to create content on a regular basis and the content must be interesting and valuable enough so that they feel compelled to share it with their friends and followers. On websites like Twitter.com people tweet your link and then their followers retweet it if they feel like it and that is how your content spreads. The same thing happens on FaceBook. On Digg.com the users “digg” your link if they like it and the more “diggs” your link can garner the more prominent spot it gets on the website. In the case of StumbleUpon the more thumbs-ups you can get, with greater frequency your link is put in front of its users.

In the case of bloggers if they like your content they link to it and write about it. From there, further, other bloggers and social media users can write about your content, link to it or promote it.

Does your content always have to be likeable and acceptable? Not always. Sometimes people will write about your content, link to it and promote it to show disagreement or express a totally different point of view. Just make sure that whenever you are publishing highly controversial and contradictory content you are sure of what you are doing. This is more important amidst social media websites where it takes a long time to build reputation and very little time to dismantle it.

The moot point is if you want to generate and publish content for the purpose of spreading your ideas and getting more business you have to work on it keeping social media in mind. The power of social media is so great that some Internet marketers have already started claiming that you no longer need the whimsical search engines to get quality traffic. In fact the traffic that you get from social media websites and blogs is more targeted because it is promoted by real people rather than ranking algorithms.

There was a time when the search engines like Google asked for more and more content so that that content could be indexed and ranked. There was a lot of talk, there still is, about creating content that is search engine friendly as well as human friendly. Sometimes if you didn’t face much competition you didn’t even have to generate lots of content. But this is not the case when you want to promote your website through social media websites. You constantly have to publish content that creates buzz among social media circles.

This trend spells trouble for organizations and individuals that have always been downplaying the value of quality content. On social media you cannot create a credible presence unless you have credible content.

Of course, by simply creating and publishing great content you cannot become a social media darling; you need to have a following. It is very hard to make people listen to you if they haven’t listened to you in the past, and that too, repetitively. People on Twitter and FaceBook sometimes have thousands of followers and they themselves are following thousands of people. This means a continuous stream of messages in front of them. How to develop a following that eagerly listens to you? This topic is beyond the scope of this blog post but yes it is an important part of leveraging social media. You cannot hack into that. Either you have to be a celebrity or a well-known person in your niche, or you have to build your followers from scratch and this may take many months. Collaborating with people who are already highly active on various social media websites may help.

More on content and branding

May 21, 2009 Comments

A month ago I had written about how to control your branding by writing or generating customized content. As it is rightly mentioned in this blog post aptly titled how to improve your branding with your content, on the Internet, you are what you write.  Your words are your greatest representatives on the Internet because they communicate with your visitors in your absence.

You can strengthen your brand by carefully creating your content strategy. You have to create content that highlights your main strengths and leverages them to get you more clients and customers ultimately. I have seen many websites and blogs in a great hurry to generate content so that they can quickly get traffic from the search engines and sometimes such flukes really work but sooner or later they end-up causing damage to their brand because the right message conveyed through right content is more important than getting random traffic from search engines through haphazardly generate and published content.

Similarly, if there is no substance in your content you cannot instill confidence among your readers and prospective customers and clients. It’s like the real world: no matter in what environment you move, you have to establish respect and authority in order to make people listen to you, pay attention to you, and take the action you want them to take.

How do you instill that confidence? Share with them as much information as possible. Instead of selling a product or a service through your content, try to help them make an educated decision. I know in the end we all want to earn more business, but don’t turn this aspiration into a desperate and grotesque exercise. Write to inform, write to put your point across, and definitely write to convince, but don’t use verbal tricks to entice your customers and clients. Once they trust you, once they trust your brand, they will definitely want to do business with you.

Every word matters, and so does every sentence. This is especially important with the advent of social media because when you are interacting through social media you are leaving your inherent footprints all over the Internet. The more you interact, the more content you generate, the more people become aware of you.

Does the language you use on your website or blog affect your search engine rankings?

May 07, 2009 Comments

By language here I don’t mean English or Portuguese or French; by language I mean the words and phrases that you use in order to create content for your website or blog.

Creating search engine optimized content is all about conveying the right message for the appropriate search terms. Whenever you are writing for your website you have to keep in mind – if it is important – for what search expressions your website should draw traffic from various search engines. For instance, my website is about offering content writing and online copywriting services. So any mixture of these expressions must get me higher rankings if I want to keep doing business through search engines.

There are many webmasters and Internet marketing experts that suggest that one shouldn’t solely depend on search engine traffic and this is true. Nonetheless the majority of your traffic comes from search engines if you don’t have thousands of incoming links from other web sites and blogs and you haven’t got tons of money to invest in online advertising. Traffic from search engines can be an invaluable, low-cost opportunity that you must leverage, and this can be done by using language that conveys the most appropriate message to the search engine algorithms so that they can rank your website or individual web pages accordingly.

Language definitely affects your search engine rankings at least in the current context. People talk about semantic optimization, and even natural language processing, but right now it doesn’t seem to be happening. The actual words still matter. If I am promoting content writing I’m not getting search engine traffic if people are searching for a creative writer, even if I wish I did and suggested subtly somewhere on my website – I get found if people are looking for a content writer because I talk so much about content writing.

This I learnt the hard way. Before deciding to become a content writer I used to design and develop websites. Due to some vague reason I ended up optimizing my website for the term “Web designing” rather than “Web designer”. I featured on the first page of Google for Web designing for a good two years and I didn’t generate much business (blogging hadn’t arrived at that time otherwise I would have converted the website into a blog). I should have actually optimized my website for web designer (of course the good side is I became a content writer). These are the small things that can have long-lasting repercussions if you’re not careful about the language you use on your website.

Image source: brandis78

Branding with a customized content

Apr 17, 2009 Comments

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

Over the Internet branding acquires a unique importance because often your presence, product and services are existing in a virtual world – people, your prospective customers, can view the images of your products or services, or even attain some digital samples if possible, but they cannot do more than that. They cannot touch or feel your offerings. If they want to purchase a pair of trousers from you, they cannot try it before buying it.

So to inspire confidence among your consumers branding becomes more important. Branding convinces them that yes, whatever they buy from you is going to be up to the mark, and buying from you doesn’t involve more risk than, say, buying from a brick-and-mortar store.

How do you establish such a brand presence on the Internet? Testimonials, recommendations and affirmations from existing customers and clients surely help. But what also helps is the way you communicate, the content on your website, your blog, and your social profile.

We operate in a conversation economy these days: what you say, and how you say it, can have immediate repercussions. Your latest blog post or article can reach the farthest corners of the planet within a few seconds with a couple of tweets or a few hundred diggs. Your content can go a long way to help you establish your brand on the Internet.

Useful, relevant and well-meaning content helps you generate a community around your presence. There are many entrepreneurs who did nothing but nurture a community around their blogs or websites. They spent more than a year generating awesome content and establishing their loyalty, and consequently, their brands. Eventually there came a time when their visitors themselves started saying that they would buy or subscribe to anything recommended or promoted by those blog or website publishers. So when these content publishers started selling on their blogs and websites, they had a ready-made market that was eagerly waiting to do business with them.

Customized content means generating content your audience can relate to. A person who publishes a blog on SEO and whose advise benefits his or her audience has a greater chance of succeeding when he or she decides to provide professional SEO services. Many among his or her current readers will eagerly become his or her clients because they are aware of the fact that he or she can really help improve their search engine rankings. Similarly, a person who writes authoritative material on management consulting has a greater chance of converting his or her visitors into his or her clients.

You can apply this branded content technique to any business.

Maximizing Your Web Presence in a Tough Economy

Mar 13, 2009 Comments

As we all watch the economy go from terribly bad to even worse, many are left wondering how to make the most of their existing company resources. For many companies, the idea of investing in marketing services of any kind is offensive as so many face major cutbacks and even layoffs.

However, the show must go on and every company must examine the marketing materials they already have developed and how they can breathe new life into them without taxing scaled-down budgets. One of the best marketing vehicles to leverage in new ways is the company Web site. This highly-versatile medium allows huge flexibility and scalability, cost-effective updates, and worldwide reach.

The idea of a fluid, regularly-updated Web site is foreign to many businesses where Web copy remains static, with only the most vital information provided. The reason for the bland copy on most sites is a lack of internal resources to dedicate to writing new content.

Web content is time consuming to develop and requires a skill set and understanding of how the Web and Internet searches work. If the writer does not understand the complexities involved, the Web site’s content will be ineffective and it will not be found quickly through Internet searches.

While it may seem counter-intuitive to outsource Web writing, it can be a very cost-effective option for Web copy development and one with a significant return on investment. But, all Web copy writers are not created equal. If you choose to work with a freelance Web writer, be sure they possess the following skills.

• SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves embedding industry-specific keywords into Web copy to help prioritize it in Web searches. If this is not done, the Web site will be buried several pages into a Web search.
• Editing. While good writing skills may seem like a no-brainer as you choose a freelancer, it is also important that they be strong editors. You do not want to edit your own Web copy and a typo is inexcusable on the World Wide Web.
• Selling. Web sites should spur sales (or at least inquiries about your company). Spinning a great company story that drives home its unique differentiators will garner more interest than “Contact Us.”
• Blogging. Talking about your company and industry is a great way to build thought leadership. Good freelance writers know how to leverage news and industry trends to develop effective blog content.
• Communication. Freelance writers work offsite and the client has less control over the time they spend on projects or how they are billed. Demand good communication and frequent updates from your freelance writers.

Are SEO and content related?

Dec 05, 2008 Comments

SEO and content are definitely related because the search engines rank your website or individual pages according to the content they contain. Your website is known to the search engines, and also to the human visitors, by the worth of its content.

Does merely having content help you in SEO?

It depends on your competition. It’s not just any content that helps you in SEO. Having hundreds of pages and blog posts on kite flying is not going to help you appear higher for model planes related searches.  The content on your website must be relevant to the primary theme of your website. What message are you trying to convey through your website and does that message address the query being used by the search engine user? You have to convince the search engine crawlers that you have got the information their users are looking for.

How can one improve SEO through content?

Generate content that is relevant, useful, and exactly talks about the topic under discussion. Take for instance, the title of this webpage; it asks “Are SEO and content related?” If somebody searches for this question and if the search engine algorithms think that this blog post contains the most appropriate answer to this question they are going to rank this blog post higher compared to other pages and blog posts. How do we do that?

Obviously the question must appear on this page at least once, prominently, in this case it appears in the title of the blog post. It is also repeated, contextually, within the blog post, this means this particular expression appears on this blog post. It doesn’t have to be repeated needlessly; use it exactly where it needs to be used.

You can also use the expression within the bold typeface (preferably just once, don’t repeated wherever your expression appears), as anchor text, in bullets, and in headings and subheadings. The basic idea is to highlight the expression and convince the search engine algorithms that this particular expression is central to what you are trying to discuss on the page.

Another way how your content can help you in SEO is creating dedicated pages for individual expressions. Again, take the question in the title of this blog post. The title asks the question and the body elaborates upon it. I’m not sure whether it is going to happen or not (with the search engines you can never be too sure) but this blog post stands a great chance of appearing higher on various search engines.

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Recent Posts

• 5 Things to Know About Writing For SEO
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• Overcoming the "So What?" problem while writing content
• Keep your SEO goals in mind while creating your content writing strategy
• The benefits of updating your existing content
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