Choosing the Right Content

You already know that content is an important piece of your marketing campaign. You need to dedicate time to creating fresh, informative content that will get consumers buzzing about your business. But that doesn't mean your content must be limited to written articles. There are many ways to include content on your website, and you need to determine which works best for your needs.

The bottom line is that all your SEO efforts will be meaningless if your content can't keep people interested. The goal is to engage your audience and if you're not doing that you won't keep new prospects interested. So figure out what your audience really wants, and make that happen.

The most common type of content is written. Written content allows the writer to demonstrate their knowledge and worth in the industry. It's informative and easily recognized by search engines. From blog articles to status updates, written content can accomplish many marketing goals and can open doors of communication. Unfortunately, because it's still the most widely used content type you might have to put in extra effort to make your content stand out.

Another versatile content method is video marketing. People enjoy the ease of watching a video, and videos add more opportunity to be entertaining, which means they're great for drawing people in. You can record a question and answer session, make a webinar, or create a traditional ad. Though more difficult to rank on search engines, videos are great for reaching consumers.

Perhaps the most popular form of content is online images. People want to share things and sharing photos online is easy for them to do. Think about all of the options: still shots, artwork, memes, and more. You can turn anything into an image, from a fun collage to an information chart. The versatility of images makes them advantageous to all marketers, especially as image sharing websites like Pinterest become more widely used.

Audio content comes in the forms of podcasts, recorded interviews, or even songs. Though not as accessible as video content, audio has been slowly gaining popularity over the years. Audio is great for drawing in people who want something to listen to, without having to commit their full attention to watching a video.

Remember that it's probably not wise to pick one form of content and stay with it. Written content might always be your strongest point, but you can still benefit from adding the occasional video. Variety will get consumers to notice you. It'll keep them coming back to your website. By exploring more than one media option you'll be able to reach a more diverse group of people, meaning that you'll see your business steadily expand.

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Focus on Quality Over Quantity

If you are just starting out in the blogosphere, you may be tempted to churn out as much content as possible to keep people coming back. Common blogger knowledge dictates that more content encourages return visits. In addition, active sites rank better than stagnant ones; frequent, regular updates train the search engines to crawl your site often. Unfortunately, quantity over quality doesn’t produce stellar articles, and the Web is full of mediocre content that is generated at high speeds. If you want your users to come back, share your content with their friends, blog about you, link to you, and most importantly convert from you, you need to stand out.

If you need figures to back up this presumption, take a look at this blogger, who claims a single, well written page from 2004 has drawn in over $50,000 over time. This content was carefully optimized for both search engines and readers, and continues to pay off even six years later. While writing this type of solid, detailed, helpful article will take more time, it clearly pays off. Creating high-quality content will increase readership and conversion, and that is really the ultimate goal of any blogger. Don’t cut corners; spend the time to generate content that serves your audience, and you may see returns for years to come.

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Guest Blogging Tips

There is no denying guest blogging as a great way to get your ideas before a wider audience, especially if your own blog is not yet widely known. It’s also a way to put your name and your brand in front of your target community and build lasting relationships. Finally, it gives you a chance to link back to your site, which is great for SEO. Recently, a few folks around the industry have shared their thoughts about guest blogging, including The Blog Herald, Richworks and DKS Systems.

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When considering guest posting, first give some thought to your own site. Does it have a lot of entries already, or are you still building up your content base? If the latter, you should probably use every article you write as content on your own site. Assuming your site is solidly packed with content and you do decide to guest post, is it ready for the influx of visitors? You can be assured you will see an increase in traffic to your site as people seek more information about the topic or the person behind the article. Be sure your contact information is up to date, your content has been recently updated, and your design is user-friendly.

As with any form of promotion, you will see results based on the amount of effort you expend. Research your niche for blogs that best suit your target audience base, then spend some time on those blogs getting to know their style and the community which follows each. Leave meaningful, well articulated comments regularly and the editors may recognize you when you make your guest post request. In addition, the community might also recognize you when they see your name or brand in the byline.

Guest posting is a powerful promotion tool when used effectively. Consider spreading your content before a wider audience, but don’t forget the simple tips above.

Optimizing for the Long Tail - A Brief Overview

While it can be tempting for the SEO to focus on a few primary or “trophy” keywords, this ignores a significant chunk of all keyword referrals known as the long tail. The long tail is made up of those key phrases that are only searched a few times, but collectively make up a significant portion of searches.

Those trailing keywords, which can be thousands or tens of thousands strong, are actually responsible for far more traffic than the head keywords because of their sheer numbers. Bill Tancer of Hitwise concluded they make up nearly 90 percent of search traffic.

Clearly, the long tail should not be ignored in optimization. Should an SEO attempt to focus on thousands of individual keywords? Returns diminish quickly when optimizing for too many keywords. Even a thousand is too many to effectively cover, but according to Tancer’s research, even the top 10,000 keywords only bring in 18.5 percent of searches. So what is an SEO to do?

The key is to focus on keyword groups. By targeting one primary keyword and its variants per page, that page can be optimized for thousands of related tail keywords all at once.

Start by carefully planning the site with keyword grouping in mind. Mark Nunny of Wordtracker suggests categories as a great way to build around primary keywords. Each category then targets a specific primary and secondary keyword. Write a long article (1,000+ words is suggested) focusing on each of these keywords and their variants, and the tail keywords will appear naturally in the copy. Be sure to put the primary and secondary keywords in prominent locations such as the page title, headlines, and links.

By targeting the long tail, you probably won’t rank first for any trophy keywords. You will, however, gain access to considerably more potential customers through a broader variety of searches.

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