Search engine optimization has come a long way over the years as SEOs and webmasters continuously test and evaluate their techniques used to increase search engine rankings. Over the past few years, established domains or not, I’ve always suggested the importance of content. If you’ve been a webmaster for some time or a SEO, even a new SEO, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “content is king.” This is SEO terminology, content is king and you better have some type of content campaign if you want to grow your search engine rankings.
Content Benefits
Content has a number of different benefits, of course increasing search engine rankings is one of the top perks. This is a given though, what else can content do for you? Content can help you brand your name, brand your company, right? Content can also be used for marketing purposes, an easy way to promote yourself or your business. Content can help you increase traffic and sales, that is a given. As you build search rankings, you build more traffic and more traffic equals sales.
Building content can also establish a level of trust with you and your customers/clients. It can also help you become an authority in your chosen niche. For example, if you’re looking for SEO services, reading a SEO’s blog would give you a general idea of the authenticity of the SEO. The same can be said about any type of service that you may offer. A blog with updated content can help you in many ways.
Content can also help you with link building. For those of you that build links, you can use content on other domains to link back to your website and articles. You want to make sure that the content is unique, don’t continue to use the same article over and over. Useful content will attract new users which can increase your numbers across the board.
Content Should Be Diverse
Your content, on-site and off-site, should be original and diverse. You should strive to aim for useful content, don’t write just to be writing. If your content has no value to the user, you won’t see the return on your investment. Each article should have a purpose. Yes, you do want to publish content daily, but don’t get lazy. You should strive for high quality content that will be shared and linked to due to. If your producing content with half the effort, you’ll see half the results.
Using the right keywords and phrases in your articles is equally important. This is an area where many SEOs make mistakes, choosing the right keywords that bring conversions. Unless you already know which keywords are bring the best conversion, you’re going to need to evaluate and test different keywords in your content. Use a wide range of primary keywords and secondary keywords in your content marketing campaign. You want to closely track your keywords and learn which keywords are bringing in traffic and leading to sales. When you know which specific keywords are working, use these keywords more.
Important to note since we are on the subject, don’t worry about your word count in your articles. This has been a debate for years. How many words should my article have? What percentage should my keywords be? Forget all that. While it is true that you don’t want to over use your keywords, I’ve seen articles rank at all word levels. I’ve seen 3,000 word articles rank on the first page and I’ve seen 300 word articles do the same. As I said before, concentrate on making your content useful.
Organizing Your Content
To get the full SEO benefits of your content, you need to make sure you content is properly organized. The same can be said about your URLs, even though it is a little off topic. Since we’re talking about search engine optimization anyway, you want your URLs to match your content. SEO 101 perhaps but it’s important, so keep an eye on your permalinks.
Now, in terms of keeping your content organized, most content management systems have categories where content can be stored and organized. In terms of search engine optimization, categories tend to have higher values since multiple articles can be stored there. Not only do you get the benefits of having the article published, you also get the added benefits of having multiple content published and organized in categories.
Make sure your categories are your top keywords while your articles can be diverse and more wide spread. Some articles can be stored in multiple categories. This can also make the user experience more enjoyable and beneficial.
Publish Content Daily
It’s extremely important to keep your blog up-to-date and important to publish content daily. Easier said then done, right? If possible, I would suggest publishing 2-3 articles a day. The more content you publish, the more results you’re going to see. Content increases your indexed pages in search engines, search engine rankings, traffic and we all know that more traffic increase your chances of making sales or conversions.
SEO takes time and rankings can can’t be established overnight. A blog will be a huge benefit for those of you that have a new domain. The key is getting content published when you are first trying to establish web rankings. For those of you that are already established, if you don’t have a blog, this may be what it missing in your ranking equation. You can’t never go wrong with content. Make it useful, beneficial and you’ll see users coming back time and time again.