Use Content to Build, Advertise and Drive Traffic to Your Online
Business

What Kind of Content Do You Need?

Going back to some of the SEO methods used in the past, some
website owners were happy to fill pages with keywords that
attracted search engines, but turned visitors off. Now even the
search engines are learning to ‘read' like a human. If the
content has too many keywords and unlikely sentence structures,
it may consider the site to be manipulated and not list it.

If you want a site that attracts search engines AND keeps people
on your website, you need to have information that is relevant,
informative and well written. However, when using methods that
are designed to attract search engines, the content still needs
to be keyword-rich. What does that mean?

Keyword-Rich Content

Keywords are very important to search engines. The words you
think that people looking for your information or product might
use in the search engines are called ‘keywords'. The search
engine acts like a Yellow Pages phone book. People look up a
topic by word or phrase and find the related entries listed.

Your traffic will depend largely on if you choose the right
words. If you use words that no one is searching for – or words
that are highly competitive – your chances of being found
through the search engines goes down dramatically.

One way to find the right keywords is to find out what words are
most popular for searches. Using a word harvester like the
Keyword Selector Tool (found at www.overture.com in the Resource
Center) you can find out approximately how many searches have
been made for your selected keywords. You may find some similar
words or phrases that have even higher amounts of searches than
your first selection.

The key to finding the best words for your content is to use the
most general term first and then find more specific words or
phrases that relate to your website. For example; if you are
looking for words for a children's education site, you might
first look up the words ‘children' or ‘education' to discover
the most searched term related to your topic. Perhaps you'll see
‘child education' or ‘teaching children' are more commonly
searched terms than ‘children's education'.

When you've found words or phrases that are commonly searched
for you can find details on the competition for these words in
the PPC area by using the View Bids Tool, also in the Overture
Resource Center. If the word has high bids or many bidders you
can consider that the competition will also be high in the
natural search engine results. Check it out for yourself. If the
natural search is bringing up sites that lack appropriate
content you may be able to top them with your own keyword-rich
content.

Unique Content

The algorithms are constantly changing, but currently it has
been stated that the search engines don't like duplicate
content. That is why many affiliate businesses that set up new
websites for each member are often unable to make a top showing
in the search engine results. Too many of the same thing.

Writing your own content or hiring a ghost writer to write it
for you will work better. Using free to reprint articles may
work, depending on the amount of times that work has been
reprinted. In every case, do not duplicate the webpage of
another site – both for ethical reasons and the fact that it
will not bode well for your search engine status.

If you are using a template site you will need to change a
significant amount of the information in order to create a site
that the search engines will consider as unique. You can do this
by changing your web page title, meta tags, introducing
paragraph and by inserting links or editorial blocks within the
article body.

Unique content is also important to visitors who may be viewing
other related websites and are looking for fresh information on
the topic. By providing unique content you will stand out from
the crowd.

Informative Content

As mentioned before, getting traffic is not valuable to you if
people leave your site right away. Providing informative content
is not only more beneficial to your visitors it is important to
‘smarter' search engines which also pick up on the content.

If the content is made up of keywords and phrases strung
together the search engine may discount it. There are
grammatical rules that some search engines may use as a basis
for weeding out optimized sites from the truly informative.

Obviously the search engines won't really know if the content is
of any value to your visitors – only you can know that – but if
you have to sit and write proper information you'd do well to
make it of value to the reader.

Relevant Content

Keeping to a theme will help your website both with the search
engines and visitors. Keyword-rich articles will likely be
relevant or you wouldn't choose them. If you are posting
information on various topics, you just won't have the
opportunity to optimize your site to its greatest potential.

Amount of Content

The more pages you can say something on the better. Keep
information pages short (400-800 words) or the search engines
may not ‘read' all the way through. Creating many web pages and
optimizing the content and the web page will allow you to target
more keywords then if you try to cram them all onto one page.

Be careful when using systems which create hundreds or thousands
of web pages automatically. Creating content for each page is
important and many of these programs create cookie-cutter sites
that are simply keyword-rich without any real content. In fact,
not only may it not help you with your position in the search
engines – it may even hurt you. With many individuals using the
same programs the search engines can read the ‘finger print' and
may consider the web pages to be invalid for inclusion in the
search engine.

Content is useful for creating traffic, pleasing the search
engines and offer valuable information to your visitors.

What else can you do with content? Check your next lesson….

Find out right in your next lesson…

In a hurry! Head to the marketing science lab….
http://presssuccess.com/cpl

Sincerely,

Jack Humphrey
Willie Crawford
Diana Barnum
Peter Lenkefi
Mark Braunstein