If there is one thing that can make or break the SEO of your website, it’s your content creation strategy. No matter how specific you are with your keyword selection and how well planned the structure of your site is, the effectiveness of your content creation is going to make almost all of the difference in your SEO. Therefore, it’s important to have a rock-solid strategy for content creation that can ensure that your site will be valuable and relevant to search engines.
The Principles of Effective Content Creation
Effective content creation begins with understanding how the information age has changed the face of marketing. There are many online business owners who are creating content that is not helping their SEO because the content is doing little or nothing to add value to their customers’ lives. This is the kind of content that tries to promote products or services without first providing customers with information or tips that truly benefit and educate them at the same time.
It has been said that no matter what business you are in, you are primarily in the education business. This has never been truer than it is today. Consumers are now more informed and educated than ever and are making their purchase decisions based more on content that is helpful and educational than that which is purely promotion. This means that if you want to create relevant and valuable content, you have to be doing three things:
- Creating content that provides your customers with a benefit that they consider valuable
- Creating content that educates them on the reason why they should do business with you
- Creating content that promotes your products and services
Focus 75% of your content on adding value and educating your customer first, these are the first two principles. If you use these correctly, you can use the other 25% to promote your company, make offers and ask for a sale. This combination of education and promotion will make your content valuable, relevant, and effective.
Offsite Content Creation: Social Networking
You’re probably aware of how important it is for you to create inbound links for your website. However, the effectiveness of those connections in regard to bringing traffic to you site and demonstrating your relevance to the search engines is going to be completely dependent on the content associated with those links.
For example, if you are going to be building links in social networking sites or by commenting on people’s blogs make sure that your comment is adding value to the site in some way. You can accomplish this by asking yourself these questions:
- Is this comment providing an interesting insight into the related topic?
- Is this comment more than just a blatant promotion to get people to come back to my site?
- Is this comment relevant to the site where I am leaving it?
If you find that you are answering no to any of these questions, then you need to reconsider and revise your content accordingly.
Offsite Content Creation: Article Submission
One of the most important content creation strategies which you will be using to build backlinks and create more positive customer conversionsis article submission. This is another place where you can really build a bunch of nothing really fast. That is unless you follow these principles of good article submission:
- Make it Unique
The articles which you post on article directories must be unique to the place where you are posting them. This means that if you place them there, you rewrite them before you place them anywhere else…especially on your site. If you simply recycle the same articles for your site and for your offline article submission, you will be creating duplicated content and the two identical articles will BOTH be considered less valuable as a result.
- Target it for Related Niches
Article marketing is a great way to capture customers who may be interested in your message but who might be typing in search terms that are different than those that your site is optimized for. For example, if you are creating a site about dog training you can have an article that provides people with specific information based on the search term: “nutrition for puppies.”
This allows you to create content that is specific to that keyword term for people who might also need dog training services. This way you can keep your onsite content targeted to your main keywords.
- Add Value
When creating content for article submission, don’t be afraid to “give away the store” and therefore create a 500 article that basically says nothing. The more valuable and informative your articles are the more likely they are to attract positive attention and visitors to your site, and the more valuable that link will become.
The Strategy of Onsite Content Creation
It is important to follow the same principles of uniqueness, value, and specificity for your onsite content creation in addition to the following strategies:
- Be Consistent
In relation to creating onsite content for SEO purposes, you must remember this: “A lot inconsistent does not make much but a little bit consistent makes a lot.” Instead of posting huge blasts of content every once in a while, update your site with fresh blog entries or articles every week or even every day.
- Build Value
Remember that when you are creating content you are not doing it just to appease the search engines. You must also be creating content which is educating your customers and providing them with valuable information that will benefit them in a way that means something to them. Without this, you might as well be talking to a wall.
- Promote
There is no point in creating content so that people can get their fill and leave your site without compensating you…unless you want to go out to business. As long as you are consistent with your content and you are adding value, you can promote your services or products with about 25% of your content.
In closing, make sure that you are consistently tracking the effectiveness of your content by keeping track of your visitor conversions and your page rankings. This will help you to focus your content creation and use it to build a valuable and relevant website.
Helpful Links
Places to find freelance writers for content creation:
Forum for internet marketing, content marketing, and SEO:
In-depth information on content marketing in the information age:
