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What is the most important thing on the world wide web? Content!
Content is what the Internet revolves around. People search the web for content and when they find it, the reason for their search is fulfilled. What is the best way of helping a website rank highly in the search engines? Adding fresh, relevant, new content on a frequent basis to meet the needs of your target audience. Content can come in many forms from text based content, to audio, to video. The purpose of content on the web is to enlighten and engage your website visitors. You can create content on your webpages and add content to external websites that point to your webpages. For instance, an article can be written for your blog (I’d recommend that your article is at least 500 words) which would, technically, be known as a blog post. You can also write guest blog posts (preferably on a regular basis) for relevant, authority (or at least high ranking) websites. If you’re creating video content then YouTube is the second largest search engine (second to Google also known as The Big G) and embed this video into your webpages. You can also add video content to your webpages using a video embedding script in HTML5. This is the preferred option if you’re looking for a more professional look for your main webpages but I think that YouTube is sufficient for your blog posts. It also gives your blog posts a more personal feel.
Let’s get writing
One of the best pieces of advice that I can give you before you begin to write content is to decide how your time is going to be best spent. What are your skills? Do you like writing? Would you prefer to hire someone else, a subcontractor or freelance writer or member of staff perhaps, to write your content?
Once you’ve decided who is going to write the content for your website and for the many back-links that you propose to write, it’s time to develop a plan. Remember, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
So let’s get planning. The first rule of planning is to decide what the constraints are…time, money and other resources. And, of course, there is going to be a limit to how much content you can write before the quality of your content begins to decrease because you run out of things to write about….but, to be honest, it’s rare that a business will run out of pertinent topics to discuss. You just have to think outside of the box!
Once you’ve begun the planning process and you know how much time and/or money you have to spend to writing content, it’s very important to keep up your content writing. So you’ll have your website and you may need to add new webpages as and when you develop and deploy new products/services to the marketplace. You’ll also need to write content for your blog (probably on a more frequent basis than the rate at which you add new webpages) and then you’ll need to write lots of content to use to create back-links including press releases, articles for articles directories, Web 2.0 properties, snippets for social media sites to link back to your blog posts or Web 2.0 properties, guest blog posts and so on. There is lots of content to write so you’d better get busy!
Deciding what to write about
So you’ve got to the stage where you’re decided how much time you have to write or how much budget you can spend on your freelancer/s or a mixture of both. It’s now a good idea to choose some blog post titles and article titles and get writing. This is where most people come unstuck. They know that they need to write content, they have heard that content is king and they know that Google, Yahoo, Bing and other popular search engines love content and are more likely to rank your webpages higher for keywords and search terms if you add fresh, new content on a regular basis. But there are no shortcuts. The next paragraph will reveal all you need to know about writing pertinent content that users and search engines are both highly likely to love.
If you want to write great content then have a baseline plan to write around your topic. So if you’re writing about SEO then perform keyword and keyphrase research and write about those topics. Make sure that your articles and blog posts follow a trend and are added to your website in a timely order so that you develop a readership. Part of your Internet Marketing plan should be to engage your target audience and entice them to keep coming back again and again. You should plan to write general articles and blog posts that explain your products/services as well as continuing to look for timely and relevant topics that you can apply your business to. Try not to regurgitate what is already out there on the web too much. Try to be innovative and give your opinion and back it up with evidence and facts. If there are two or more sides of an argument them gives all accounts and let your readers decide what is the best course of action for them. If you’ve ever tried writing content then you’ll know what I’m talking about. You’ve got to keep adding fresh new content and make sure that you write to a plan or you might forget what you’re trying to achieve. But with a list of keywords for inspiration and your keyword and keyphrase research to back up your efforts you really can’t go wrong.
Remember what your goals are. They are to be a source of content on the Internet that is unique, informative and your content must be intelligently written. You must speak to your readership an engage them. Remember, content is king!
