Content and SEO
- 28th Feb 2008
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- Content Writing
There are many types of content some which you should be able to do yourself and some you just need professionals for :
Your Intro Content : First off this really need to be done be an inhouse person that really understands your business and an external keyword researcher may come in handy here as they will be able to assist in site content which uses targeted keywords which in turn will give you a better search visibility and increased traffic.
Blog or Linkbait : Blog content or ‘linkbait’ these pages can provocative or informative as well as been heavy in keywords, The benefits are massive in the e-commerce sector the ability to have product reviews and open discussion without muddying your main site, the opportunity to give away sample and competitions without distracting the buying customer.
International Copy: a common mistake here is outsource all the content whilst not been able to read the content I have seen companies move into other countries only too find out that they have no one on staff to support the emails in that language, the tip here is interpretation not translation.
Industry News : This is a true outsource service, with a News Service you need to keep completely up to date and have the ability to write compelling articles. You can gain authority, repeat visitors and the fresh copy will keep search engines coming back for more and more. a neat trick here is to have a staging server and add you comments into the news before publishing it.
DaveN
12 Comments | Leave a comment »
Good content is very important for SEO.
Industry news is an easy one to screw up. I know several SEO sites that get an outside agency to write their news (you know the ones) and the content is boring and will never attract any links. Compare that to the number of links attracted by SEO companies who write a blog themselves.
Hey, Patrick I agree totally, but get 5 good news articles a day and a feature reports once a week unless it’s you full time job. get a bunch of journalists on the case
With the outsourced news feeds you have to be carefull you don’t end up with a slightly tweaked AP wire story, but if you get the right people and let them know what you are looking for it can work quite well.
I think your tip on interpretation is right on the money, especially with regards to multi-lingual SEO - not that I have experience in that area. But it would be pretty dumb to say rely on a bunch of agents to merely translate copy and feed it via xml to your 2nd language subpage/domain or different domain altogether especially with no support. In terms of my personal web experience, i think editorial is even more important if people will constantly come back to your site to read the news (that they can easily get elsewhere). And totally agreed on getting journos on the case. I know for one thing - it is very hard to do and you may as well have a strategy and a full time journo on the case otherwise its money wasted. As writing your own blog, well yeah why not? But i think thats a pure SEO strategy rather than a fuzzy online marketing strategy where you’re hoping to gain notoriety (cal it branding?) and links rather than just links. Just my take. A
There is no getting away from the fact that content is important to any well thought out SEO campaign. My customers are seeing real success with good quality content. One this i would say is spun content i dont think is all its cracked up to be. I tested the systems and wasnt impressed. If Google will accept that stuff long term is questionable. There is a definite drive for good site body content, and user generated content (The Golden Goose).
Typo in my last post was deliberate!! honestly lol!
Dave good post, as we all know content is everything and so it should be. It’s an investment so you need to be smart about how you create it. Crap content = crap results, to be a winner online you need to give people a reason to bookmark your site. Think about that when your creating a page or a site, are you making a pile of crap or something worthy of a bookmark. That is the question I ask myself anyway, what does this site/page bring to the table? Should the web be something different?
Garbage in, garbage out.. Without good content, every website is doomed. An SEO should understand the difference between good and bad content, whether he writes it himself, hires writers or teaches the company how to write seo-copy themselves.
Over the last 5 year I have found that content has remained king and if anyone ever asks for my number one tip I tell them GOOD content
Well said yourslice, If you look at the sites that have been burned over the last few years very few of them carry good content. Balance yor advertising with your content and you are onto a winner.
I feel like a complete blank, but what can I say?,