Are you leveraging your content?

I once wrote this great book that could have changed the history of the world as we know it today. Unfortunately it was never published so no one read it. Great works of literature and art would have been lost had it not been for someone appreciative who thought “hey everyone should be witness to this”.

Well this may just be a pipe dream of a silly writer… but to be successful it’s crucial to get published and that your work is available across multiple locations and communities.

The online world is no different. You can be spending hours and days writing and building great content but if it’s not published and promoted correctly across diverse web and user communities, no one would have read it.

Don’t let it become your pipe dream!

Imagine millions of pages of content shouting out to be visible. What can you do to stand out? Assuming you have done your SEO optimization and keyword analysis well, one is to build original, resourceful and informative content around those keywords, and two is to make that content accessible across multiple web and user communities.

Not only will the search engines love you for it, other websites will send you requests to link back to your content, and users/readers will flock to see what new insights you have to offer.

Search engines have two main criteria’s while ranking your page, the quality of your content and link backs to your content. If others (popular sites and user communities) deem your content valuable, and are ready to link back to your content, then search engines deem that content valuable.

So good content focused around your keywords that is well syndicated and promoted will help you please the users and the search engines. So don’t be in a hurry to get your content published…have your content syndication and promotion strategy in place.

So when is the best time to syndicate your content?

How can you make each blog post count?

Generally once I publish my content, either on blog post, or on my site, I immediately start submitting to article sites (top article sites generally take a few hours to few days to publish the content).

Once I am done with article submissions, I use social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Furl, Stumble Upon, Blink List, Yahoo Bookmarks etc to promote my content to the user communities. I make sure I use interesting and catchy headlines to get their attention. I generally follow this cycle for each post or page of content I publish online.

So make each page, each blog post, and each article count.

Developing content can be handled in-house as at the end of the day you are the experts in your domain and understand your business best. In case in-house resources are not possible you can use the services of a good seo content services company or freelancer copywriters and article writers.

Ensure that the person you hire is well versed with writing on various topics (if you can find someone with experience in writing about your domain, its good) and is familiar with SEO editorial guidelines.

Quick Tips:

1. Post your content on article submission sites (it’s not treated as duplicate content)
2. Submit your content to social bookmarking sites to target user communities
3. Submit your content to RSS feeds
4. Build links to your content from diverse web and user communities

So if you are building great content, and syndicating and promoting your content, then you will find many appreciative webiste owners who will think “hey everyone should be witness to this”.

This, my friends is no pipe dream.

Also Read:

Is Content the King?
SEO Guide to Article Writing
Link Me Up Scotty!
The Link Building Matrix (Reloaded)

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SEO Expert Secrets: Going Beyond Keywords

We all know that keyword and keyword phrases are the foundation of the search engine optimization process, but today we will journey into a world beyond the visible keyword universe.

Well let’s face it, the search engines are getting better and better at figuring out relevant and the irrelevant pages, and the bad one are slowly getting weaned out. Search engines use complex algorithms and methods like LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) to determine the relevancy and ranking of the page against the keyword typed by the user. Methods like LSI examine the content of the page as a whole, rather than trying to locate specific keywords placed strategically on the page (which has been prone to manipulation).

This means that search engines do not require an exact match of your keyword phrase to find relevant pages. I am not saying that placing your keyword in the Meta tags, title, description, link text, heading tags and body content is not important for SEO, but rather that SEO experts will soon have to think beyond the standard keyword optimization of pages to achieve desired ranking results.

What this means for your online business is that search engines will determine the relevancy of your page/keyword based on the content of the page as a whole using semantically close words, related words, similar phrases, and the relationships between the words to determine the relevancy and ranking for the page. At the end of the day, it’s anyone’s guess what the search engines will change or do next, but by following certain basic seo principles and good content practices you can safeguard yourself against.

So it’s not just your keyword that’s important, it’s the right combination of all the words in your content that will matter eventually. Keep in mind the simple rule that the content of your page should have the right supporting context to support your keyphrase (s).

While you don’t need to understand in depth the technologies and methodologies used by search engines, you do need to understand what impact they will have on your online business.

So how does this affect your online business? It forces you to write more relevant and more compelling content. This is good for your business because you'll have content that generates more traffic and conversions and it’s good for the search engines because it increases the quality of the content in their indexes.

In your business is visibility in the search engines, targeted traffic and high rankings for your keywords important to you? Then you need to re-evaluate your seo content strategy and its impact on your search marketing goals.

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Is Content the King?

From a SEO’s perceptive I would like to start by saying that content is not the King. Its original and compelling content that’s worthy of an in-bound link that’s King. For those who are not getting the difference, one has just to look at all the badly written, unreadable, rehashed and duplicate content that’s available online.

In the quest to create lots of content and related keywords to rank, online marketers somewhere forgot that content writing is an art to excite, educate, entertain and enable the readers, and not a marketing function.

Even search engines say that eventually search rankings will be mostly about the quality of the original content on your websites and blogs.

We all know that having well written content on your website or blog is a must if you are to attract and induce the user to read further, to try out a new service, or buy a product. If the users do not find the content engaging they will not return to your website or blog. So why is there so much bad content being created online?

Some companies and individuals assume that they will create multiple pages of similar, rehashed or quickly written content to get top ranking for multiple keywords and then somehow convert that traffic into business by giving marketing links, banners, affiliates etc.

In short their objective is to deceive the search engines and the users into believing that they have valuable content for those keywords and get the clicks.

Creating content solely for the purposes of making multiple entry pages for keyword ranking may seemingly serve its purpose in the short run (much to my irritation), but search engines are getting better at understanding content and its perceived value, so those pages offering no value other that for the purpose of linking and advertising will be debarred.

Eventually we will live in a world where instead of finding ways of fooling users and search engines, companies and individuals will be focus on creating real value and content for their users, where each click will lead to informative, well written and resourceful content, but till that day comes (ever hopeful) we will have to make do with some of the crappy pages of content online.

Is well written content the same as optimized content or seo content?

No, SEO content or optimized content is written and focused around a specific keyword that you want to rank. You follow all the rules you would normally follow while writing interesting and engaging content for your users, and in addition you also ensure that your keyword (maintaining ideal keyword weight) is evenly spaced across the content, nicely blending into your writing.

One word of advice, before hiring the services of a writer who claims to have an understanding of SEO, or the services of a SEO content services company, evaluate whether the people who you will be working with are original content creators or online marketers.

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