Create Quality Content for Your Sites

Write Quality Contents 

Create quality content other sites will want to link to Successful SEO requires successful link building. Building inbound links from other sites to yours and promoting your brand across the web are essential to search engine success. The more competitive a keyword, the more important links and brand promotion become. If any piece of work is the most important part of SEO then link building is it. It’s also the hardest.

On-page optimization is easy to manipulate, so search engines look for other signals about the popularity and relevance of your site.

Search engines look for information in the links that point to your website. These are much more difficult to manipulate and so are given great importance in search engine’s algorithms.

Google and other search engines know that links can be bought to try and fool them. So they increasingly look at:

• Quality links from trusted and authoritative sites, and

• Social links and mentions of the site and page on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

I’m still calling these links and their promotion ‘link building’. But we might call this part of the building and promotion of a trusted brand.

We can use some simple headlines and a ‘pack of cards’ metaphor to summarize the relationship between content, links, SEO and branding …

Content is king

Links are queen

SEO is joker

Branding is banker

To build quality links over time, you need:

• Good content

• An understanding of your online community

• To know how to get external sites to link to yours

You can do this, no matter what level of experience you have.

You’ll soon be getting quality inbound links without even asking for them if you approach the job systematically and give it sufficient time.

Find and explore your target market’s online community

Find the blogs, forums, news sites and power players on Twitter and Facebook.

Study them.

What do the people on them really want?

What are they passionate about?

Which subjects get the most comments, tweets and likes?

What will get talked about and passed on at the ‘water cooler’ (Twitter/ Facebook)?

What will they link to?

Make your content about these subjects.

Make that content ‘sticky’; ie, make people want to read it and pass it on.

Here are a few guidelines from ‘Made to Stick’, by brothers Chip and Dan Heath …

Make your content …

Simple

Choose your lead story and stick to your core subjects.

Unexpected

The predictable and the normal is ignored. Surprise people.

Concrete

People don’t connect with abstract concepts and generalizations.

Write about specific things. Use specific numbers. It’s 32.2% not 30%.

Credible

Credence comes via figures and bodies of authority and from small details of local and expert knowledge.

Emotional

Find your target audience’s emotional subjects and make these hooks in your content.

Story

Always tell a story. People pass on stories not facts.

Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Story = SUCCESS

Ideas for content

When I teach SEO, the same question always gets asked: “What will I write about?”

Let’s try and answer that with a big list of ideas and ways of finding ideas:

Use keyword research tools like Wordtracker Keywords

A list of up to 1,000 keywords usually gives you a hundred subject ideas for writing.

Answer questions

On any subject, ask and answer …

What? Why? How? Who? Where? When?

Use Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions tool Enter a keyword and the result is a list of questions asked with real searches on search engines.

On any subject, ask and answer the questions …

How big is it? How many are there? What does it look like? How do people feel about it? What does it feel? When did it exist? Are there any ethical issues raised? Is anyone’s virtue questioned?

Different types of content include ...

Review products, events and other websites, Case studies, Top 10 lists , How-to articles, Blog posts, Podcasts, Videos, Photos and photo collections, News, Interviews, Press releases, Widgets, Tools, Readers’ comments, Forums, Category pages that help users find what they want