Content Is King

Over the last few months there have been some huge changes in the world of SEO , The number one rule still hasn’t changed and that is that CONTENT IS KING. Google rolled out the Panda filter aka the farmer update, rather than an update the Panda filter was a periodic filter that is run at Google’s own discretion, this filter seeks out ,weak , copied , auto posted content and penalizes sites that engage in these practices. Quality unique content has never been more important in terms of gaining and holding a good rank within the search engines.

Unique Quality Content Is The Biggest Influence On Rankings, Add In Social Shares And You Are On To A Winner.

With the arrival of the social web and the vast amount of social signals users can give to a site ( think tweets , facebook shares, diggs, stumbleupon, most recently Google pluses ) now being used by the search engines as a way to gage how popular a sites content is, in the eyes of users. It is important to make content that is both engaging, informative but also compels the user / reader to share your content.

Bearing the above in mind a couple of questions should have started to form in your mind.

1 What would my potential prospects find useful to know about my product or service?

2 What is my current site content reading like ? is it engaging , informative is it unique, and has it been shared?

3 What amount of words, pages , do I currently have on my site ?

4 How much high quality content can I create and how often do I need to posting it, and most importantly how am I going to get people to view it ?

What’s Your Content Strategy?

We recently started working for a new client whose  industry was quite niche, the industry was already quite mature in terms of web enabled with the tops sites already having an abundance of high quality content on there sites, as well as building several keyword domains with lots of unique content. We decided that the best way to get this clients site moving up the rankings was to build ten really high quality contented pages and to re enforces these pages with more articles placed around the web all pointing back at these unique pages.

At first the progress was a little slow it took around three to four weeks to create the pages and then to start to lay in the out site content on highly ranked sites, slowly we witnessed the page views start to come in and the pages being placed inside the rankings, from here we witnessed the start of the social signals coming in and the odd user comments being left ” Great ideas thanks for the information this really helped ” was one of my favourite , in turn we linked out to the relevant item pages for each page. The keywords we were and still are chasing all had one million plus results and within two to three months we have ranked the clients either on the front page or just hovering off the front page.  We expect to secure top 10 rankigs over the next two to three months on the majority of there keywords.

• Blog Content: Almost every target prospect for every industry asks questions, more and more people use the internet to research before making a buying decision, bear this in mind. Creating a blog that is both useful and helpful is a good way to create search engine friendly content, the content on your blog should be useful and helpful which in turn hopefully encourages readers to share and like your content. For all types it content it i useful to know what keywords your target prospect is searching for do not just target the biggest keywords in your industry, try to seek out the question or lead phrases your client will be searching for to find the product or service you offer,  example for ourself could be SEO Company Manchester
  

Social Media Content Plan

The big thing about social media content is not self promotion, it is more important to have useful helpful content that users feel compelled to share with their friends, think about your facebook friends and the kind of stuff you share with them. The same can be said when creating Twitter content  you need to be creating helpful content ( same story ) as people start to follow you , you will become a specialist within in your industry , but what if you sell irons or something similar not many people want to read about irons and the new steam features of the latest models, this is very true but the search engines still pick up on your links. The Golden rule of all social media content should always be  It’s not about what you get, it’s about what you give.

Mix all three channels for example tweet your blog posts , share your latest facebook poll on both your blog and twitter account, if you land a user on any of three platforms try to drive them towards the other two , which in turn engages your prospect for longer.

Never make the now fatal killer web content mistakes , never copy and paste content from another site , Google as well as all other search engines know when this is the case. Never ever use auto content feeds as this breaks the rule of copied content just mentioned. If you cant be bother to write unique compelling content get someone else to write it , if your going to use the $5 article writers you can find around the web don’t expect great results as your article will be one of just maybe thirty they write that day.

Remember The First Rule Content Is King.