Creating Content
Creating Great Content is Essential to High Quality SEO
Adding great content to your website is good idea for several reasons other than SEO. First, the content and articles on your website are a direct reflection of your business expertise and knowledge. For many businesses, even a local service business, a few interesting, thoughtful articles on the website can make a big difference and separate you from the competition. An article can help establish your business as a knowledgable source and good partner for future business when the need arises. Second, well written and interesting articles can help attract quality traffic to your website and provide the foundation for healthy SEO efforts.
Consumers (and therefore search engines) are interested in relevant and fresh information:
Creating and producing content for your business and your website should not be a one time event that you are hoping to complete and not have to think about again for a few years. Your website and your business need to be more dynamic than a few static pages discussing services and other generic information. Although this generic information is required and will serve your online marketing efforts, there are companies that are utilizing fresh content to elevate their business and online marketing effectiveness.
Content Management Systems (CMS) make your life easy!
A website using a Content Management System, such as Joomla or Wordpress, provide business owners, marketers and designers easy access to upload new content to the website. CMS programs can be used by non technical users to easily maintain and add pages to your website. If you are not currently using a CMS on your website, consider at least adding a 'Blog' or 'Article' section to your current website using a CMS.
Also, try and keep spelling and grammatical errors to a minimum and write at least 400 words per article.
A Few Ideas on Making Your Content Fresh!
Regardless of your industry, you can still make an effort to keep the information you want to share with potential customers: Fresh, Interesting and Helpful. You can always take a fresh take on information that you might consider as commonplace in your business. Never assume that others know what you know, as you are the expert in your business.
1. Lists: Make your article some type of LIST. Everone likes a good list. Lists get straight to the point and provide clear value to readers. (e.g. 5 Ways To Do XYZ)
2. Tips: An article based around providing tips should provide value. Again, you can make a List about Tips (e.g. 10 Tips For "Insert Your Business Topic")
3. Myths: A great way to help readers and establish yourself as an an expert is to explain some common (or uncommon) misconceptions or confusion in your business or topic area. Myths can be explained as an article or in a List form (10 Myths About "Insert Your Topic")
4. Resource List: A helpful article can be comprised of a collection of valuable resources. A good list of resources about a a topic or category, assembled by an expert, can be extremely valuable to readers and "sticky". A great resource list will keep users, traffic and search engines coming back for more!
5. Survey or Research: Poll your customers or coworkers on a relevant topic and report the results. This can be informal and fun. You can even poll some of the "experts" on the topic and report the results or findings.
Content creation is an extremely important aspect of the overall marketing plan and is a topic of continued discussion on this website. We would also mention here, that as you construct your articles and content, try and write naturally and do not spend too much time attempting to interject your keywords unnecessarily. If you write naturally and use words judiciously, you should be OK.