How Important Is Content Creation?
Without content no website can succeed. It’s like a car without an engine. It just won’t go. So you can bet it’s the most important part of your website development. But should you outsource it or hire an in-house writing team?
There are pros and cons to both. An in-house writing team will be easier and more convenient to communicate with and train. However, it could also be more expensive.
With outsourcing, it’s easier to let someone go if they aren’t producing the quality that you expect. It’s also a good way to test writers that you may be considering for an in-house team. Many times you can get very good quality writers at just a fraction of the cost of hiring someone to work inside your company.
So where do you find writers to produce your content? Here are a few resources you might consider:
- Craigslist
- Freelance websites like Guru and Elance
- Reading blogs within your niche or industry
- Job boards
- Local colleges and universities
- Professional writing associations
It’s important that any writer you hire, whether they be an in-house writer or a freelance writer, have some necessary knowledge. At a minimum they should:
- Be familiar with search engine optimization strategies
- Understand social media marketing
- Know your goals and objectives
- Be familiar with your company style and voice
On that last point, it’s not just important to know your style and voice. A good writer must be able to imitate it. After all, they are producing content for your website and your readers will know if they get it wrong.
Whether you hire an in-house writing team or a group of freelancers, keep in mind that your content is your business. Don’t let them compromise it.
Content Or Web Design? Which Is More Important?
When it comes to online marketing and web design there are certain things that every marketer considers to be absolutely true, then there are certain things that are debatable. One of the things that often comes up for debate is the relationship between design and content. Which do you favor?
Before you answer, consider some of these points:
- An ugly website can still make money
- If you do not capture your visitor’s attention in 3 seconds then they will go elswhere
- No one buys anything online until they read something that makes them click the Buy button
- Pictures tell a thousand words
- You don’t need a thousand words to sell
- All other things being equal, people will spend more time on a pretty website than on an ugly one
Some of these statements may seem contradictory, but each step on its own is worth a goldmine of wisdom. But what do you make of “an ugly website can still make money” and “people will spend more time on a pretty website than an ugly one?”
Can both be true?
Yes, actually, they can. You need to keep in mind that content is what sells, not design. However, a beautiful web design can enhance a user’s experience. If your site visitors are turned off by the design of your website then they may not stick around to read the content. But if they do read the content and it doesn’t sell them on your products or services then your design won’t either.
Bottom line, web design and content go hand in hand. Make them work together.
5 Websites You Can Build Related Content And Inbound Links With
Internet marketing has grown so much more competitive and sophisticated in recent years. Beyond your own website, there are several places online you can go to build more content related to your niche and even include inbound links to web properties you own. Here are 5 such websites where you can go to building related content.
- Squidoo - Squidoo is more than a content tool. It’s an online marketing and money making tool to. You build “Lenses” around a particular topic and can include links to any online resources that you choose. It’s great to use as a link building tool because you can make your Lenses relevant to your niche topic and website AND it has a PR 8. In addition, you can add AdSense code and affiliate links so that your Squidoo Lenses make money.
- HubPages – HubPages are almost like Squidoo Lenses. You can build them around a niche topic and earn money from them. However, they are most effective when you build shorter pages (Squidoo Lenses work better as longer articles) with several of them on the same topic linked together to form a hub.
- Knol Pages – Knol Pages are not as monetizable as HubPages and Squidoo Lenses but they are good for building links. Write a high value article on a given topic and link to your own web properties. It’s a great link building tool.
- Associated Content – Now owned by Yahoo!, Associated Content is a lot like HubPages. You create content around a specific topic and link out to your own web properties or other web properties. You can monetize your AC pages with AdSense ads and share the revenue with AC.
- Examiner – Organized sort of like a newspaper (can you tell by the name?), Examiner is the local version of HubPages. You can create content on a single topic for a local audience and it’s a great tool to use for building a reputation within your niche, which is better than direct monetization.
With these 5 websites, you can become an expert in your niche above and beyond your own website and even use them to make money, build your reputation, drive traffic to your websites and increase your inbound link popularity.
Viral Marketing Starts With Updated Content
The first thing you should do before you embark on that new viral marketing campaign is to give your website content a complete look over and overhaul it, if necessary. Let’s face it. If your site is more than five years old then chances are it needs an overhaul. So do it.
What does an overhaul mean, exactly?
First, it doesn’t mean redesigning your site from scratch – though that might not be a bad idea either. It may not even mean changing every word on the site. What it probably means, at least in most cases, is to rewrite the content so that it has more a now feel to it and not an outdated feel.
If the information on your site is outdated then you definitely need to rewrite it so that it is more up to date and contains accurate information. For some sites that might mean a complete overhaul. For other sites it could mean simply tweaking a few words or lines here or there to keep the information up to date. Every site is different so every site has different needs.
The bottom line: Viral marketing won’t work if your site is out of date. Keep the content current.
Should You Use A Content Mill?
Content mills are not new. They are, however, new at dominating the SERPs. I’ll restate that another way.
There was a time long ago (like in the late 1990s) when there were two types of content. There was the high quality content that you’d find on any A-list website and there was less-than-stellar content. Some of that less-than-stellar content was produced by freelance writers or people who wrote SEO content for others to profit from.
In those days the ratio of quality content to the other kind was pretty even. But today, the less-than-stellar content seems to have taken over some corners of the web while quality content struggles to stay afloat.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
There really are just two (legal) ways to acquire quality content for your website.
- You can write it yourself
- You can hire someone to write it for you.
If you hire someone to write your content for you then you’ll still be responsible for its quality. What guidelines do you have for that? If you have none then you’ll have to accept the guidelines of you content provider. Will it be quality content?
This is where webmasters who cannot write themselves can end up in a quandary. If you hire a budget writer then you’ll likely get budget content. For the high quality content you need to spend some money. And there’s the rub. Can you afford the quality content?
This is ultimately your decision to make, but don’t make it blindly. If you want your content to shine then you need to hire a quality content provider.
Do You Have The Right Keyword Mix?
Search engine optimization is a multi-tiered marketing approach. You cannot simply add a couple of keywords to your search engine marketing campaigns and think that is going to be enough. The most important thing to know about search engine optimization today is that natural language optimization, or semantic language, is the road to success.
What does that mean?
Natural language writing is a style of writing that uses keywords for text enhancement, but it is not keyword-centric. In other words, you are not writing keyword-based content. You are writing content in such a way that it reads naturally, which is the way that people talk in normal conversation. Then you spruce it up with the right mix of keywords.
How do you know what is the right keyword mix? You settle on a primary keyword. That is the keyword you ensure appears in your title headline and multiple times on your page. Then, pick a secondary keyword and a tertiary keyword. Make sure they are related to the primary keyword, but not a variation of it. In other words, you wouldn’t use “truck driver”, “truck drivers” and “truck driving”. You’d be better off with keywords such as “truck driver” “eighteen wheeler” and “Big Rig”.
You don’t want your secondary and tertiary keywords to overshadow your primary keyword so use them but use them sparingly. And make sure that your SEO content reads naturally, not forced.
Why Web Design Is Important
Web design is an important part of doing business online. In the old days, if you had a website it was enough. People were not expecting attractiveness. But today, an ugly website won’t do. Your website needs to have a pretty face.
Your first impression as a business will often be your website. If it looks cluttered and unorganized then people will have that impression of your business and you will lose sales. It is vitally important to focus your web design efforts on three key areas of first impression:
- Attractiveness of design
- Search engine optimization
- User functionality
If you ask which of these is more important, the answer is none of them. They are all equally important. Your web design should be attractiveness enough to keep people interested long enough to read the content. The content needs to search engine optimized so that it attracts the right people through search engine marketing channels. And it needs to be functional and easy to use for your visitors. Miss the mark on any of these and you’ll lose sales. But it all starts with a pretty web design.
On Page Vs. Off Page SEO: Which Is More Important?
There are SEOs today, and some of them are quite well known, who teach that link building is the most important aspect of SEO. But is it? Well, just try building links to a blank page and see what happens. I’m betting not much.
On the other hand, I’ve seen web pages rise to the No. 1 position for their targeted keywords just for their on page factors alone.
A few years ago Google fixed a problem called Google Bombing that caused certain pages to rank No. 1 on the basis of thousands of inbound links using the same anchor text. The thing was, the anchor text was seldom relevant to the page in question. We can chalk that one up to the value of link building.
Of course, it goes without saying that both on page and off page SEO are important. But, what if you had to do without one or the other? Which would you choose? You’d better say off page SEO because even if you could rank a page on the basis of inbound link anchor text alone, what value would that be for a page with no content?
There’s more to SEO than being No. 1 in the SERPs. You’ve also got to convert traffic and you can’t do that without on page content.
How Web Design And Content Are Connected
One of the oldest adages concerning Internet marketing is “Content is King.” The adage simply means that content is the most important aspect of your website because without content you really have no website. But that doesn’t mean that web design isn’t important.
Perhaps one of the things that many webmasters don’t think about is what your web design is actually for. You should consider your web design template as a shell for your content. If it were nuts, the web design would be the shell and the content would be the nut.
So what is the web design for, exactly?
Well, your web design is the face of your website. Having an attractive web design is much more important today than it was in the past. Ten years ago you could have an ugly site and get away with it. Not so much today. That doesn’t mitigate the importance of content, but you should consider that your site’s web design will either drive visitors away or attract them to the content. And there’s the rub. If your web design doesn’t point visitors to the content then it’s failing you. Pretty or not.
Do Article Spinners Work?
There is a new practice in article marketing using SEO tactics on the cheap. It’s called article spinning. The practice is simply taking an old article and putting it through a computer software program that mixes it up and changes the sentences around so search engines don’t recognize it as duplicate content. The problem is, it is duplicate content and usually the articles don’t make a whole lot of sense.
For instance, the article spinner will take a sentence from the third paragraph and make it the opening paragraph. It might even exchange a keyword for another pre-selected keyword. Then it will take a sentence from the bottom of the article and make it the second sentence while moving the first sentence of the original article to the third sentence spot and thus forming a new paragraph.
The article spinner rearranges the entire article this way. And marketers actually use them.
I’m not going to say that the articles are poorly SEOd. By bot standards, the SEO isn’t bad. But the writing is usually horrendous. I don’t know how people make money with these articles, but some do.
It’s almost always better to use original articles. Original content in any format is always best. The search engine optimization will almost always be better, but the writing, which is always for humans any way, will nearly always be a big step up. And your reputation will go along with it.
Two Essential Elements To Viral Marketing
If you want to run a successful viral marketing campaign there are two absolutely essential nonnegotiable elements you must infuse into your content. If you have these two essential ingredients then your content may go viral. It isn’t guaranteed to go viral, but it is guaranteed NOT to go viral if your content does not have these two essential ingredients.
So what are they, these two ingredients?
The first absolutely essential ingredient to any viral marketing campaign is a message that resonates. You have to produce content that gets people emotional. It must anger them or make them fall in love. It can produce a positive feeling or a negative feeling, but it has to elicit a strong reaction. Otherwise, people will ignore it and your message will not go viral.
The second ingredient to a successful viral marketing campaign is easy accessibility. Your content must be accessible to anyone anywhere. In other words, it cannot be behind a paywall. If people have to jump through hoops to get to your content then they won’t share it with their friends. They won’t even experience it for themselves. You’ll kill your viral marketing campaign before it begins.
That’s it. Any viral marketing campaign that even hopes to succeed must, at a minimum, possess these two qualities. Otherwise, you might as well just hang up your viral hat.
Content, Links, Meta Tags – Which SEO Factor Is Most Important?
Content, links, meta tags, keywords … it’s all a sea of confusion, right? Which SEO factor is most important?
Links are important. They build link popularity. Relevance, page authority, anchor text, link age, they’re all important, right? Yes, they are all important. But links are the not the most important thing for SEO. Without at least one inbound link to your website, it won’t get crawled and the search engines won’t index it. But for search engine ranking purposes, links are not the most important SEO factor.
How about meta tags? No. In fact, Google doesn’t even consider meta tags for ranking purposes. Yahoo! and Bing still consider meta tags, but they aren’t the most important ranking criteria.
Is it keyword density? SEOs still talk about keyword density. In fact, keywords get a lot of airplay all around. Keywords in title tags, keywords in alt tags, keywords in anchor text. Yes, they’re all important. Even keyword density, to some degree, is important. But not the most important thing.
Content.
Quality, original content is the most important SEO factor online. There’s a reason “content is king” is the Internet’s chant. It’s not a campaign slogan. It’s reality. Content is the most important SEO factor. Over links. Above keyword density. And higher than meta tags.
Make your content shine and dress it up with great links, meta tags, and keyword considerations. But make your content the king.
How Viral Is Your Marketing?
There are two ways go viral in Internet marketing:
- Planned
- Spontaneous
Naturally, you can’t plan every thing you do to go viral. It’s nice if you set a plan in motion and it works. But it need not work in order for your message to go viral. The crowd can make it go viral for you.
In order to tap into the spontaneous viral marketing pool you’ve got to have a message, but not just any message. It’s got to be a great message. It’s got to be a message that people will want to share with their friends. If it’s great enough, people will share it without any prompting. And that’s the kind of viral marketing that works best.
Of course, you can always plan a viral marketing campaign. And if you can do that and pull it off, great. But note that just as many attempts to plan a viral marketing fail as succeed.
If you focus on building great content – I mean, really great content – then the viral marketing will take care of itself. All you have to do is give it a nudge and it will go.
Social Media Optimization Tip: Headlines Make All The Difference
Optimizing for social media traffic is a bit different than optimizing for search engines. But there are similarities. When you optimize your landing page for search engines, keywords are extremely important. After all, people will find your site by those keywords. But with social media, while keywords are important, they aren’t the most important thing. Social media users look for something different.
First and foremost, they want a unique experience. Keywords are good for ensuring those social media pages achieve better rankings in the search engines, but what happens if someone finds your content in Digg or StumbleUpon and arrives there from a search engine? You still want them to go to your website and that will take a different approach than merely sprinkling your content with keywords.
Your headline is very important. It should attract attention. More than that, it must get the click. Social media users have two things to go on in deciding whether or not to read your content: The headline and the description, or summary. The headline, more than anything, will determine whether or not they read your content.
What should a headline do? Three things:
- Arouse curiosity
- Tell the reader what to expect from the content
- Use your primary keyword
Understand that Nos. 1 and 2 and more important than No. 3 when it comes to social media optimization. Yes, you want your keyword there for the search engines, but human readers care about the content. It must answer their most pressing questions or make them believe that your content will answer those questions. Get them to click. That’s the goal. And if you achieve that then you’ve done your job.
Web Design Tip: Don’t Overload With Information
You’ve heard that content is king and that is true, but you can go too far. One of the five common mistakes that many businesses make in their web design is providing too much information at once.
There are several ways you can provide too much information on your website:
- Too many irrelevant pages
- Too much information on a single page, making it too long to read
- Providing too much depth when giving an overview would do
- Elaborating on topics that need no elaboration
- Redundancy
- Duplicating content
- Adding irrelevant content to pages, watering down your SEO
Web design is very important. People will leave your site as often for a poor web design as they will anything else. An attractive site is very important to keep people interested. Even then, relevant content is what keeps visitors on your site and if you have too much irrelevant content or provide more than what people are willing to read through then you could be cutting off your own nose.
Before you build your site, learn a few web design basics. Don’t be a bore.
Title Tags a ‘Must’ for On Page SEO
When evaluating site content, it’s vital to, have a look at the title tags when doing SEO. If the title tags don’t contain keywords relevant to the content of the web page, then it has a significantly lower chance of showing up in the search results. Unfortunately, many web designers these days don’t know anything about search engine optimization. A common misconception is that your site will show up for its keywords when you add them in it’s “Meta tags.” The truth is, that meta tags are one of the least effective things you can do to improve your site’s search results.
Below are a few guidelines for writing effective title tags, when we do SEO at Reciprocal Consulting, we evaluate many factor of “on-page” optimization, and help to make your site as search engine friendly as possible.
- Don’t exceed 10-12 words in the title tag.
- Make sure that the keywords you’re targeting are actually represented in content on the page.
- For more competitive keywords, keep it short and sweet.
- For less competitive keywords, or when you’re not targeting anything specific, shoot for the “long tail” by having longer title tags.
- Think about clickthrough rates and visitor perception – the title tag is the first thing they will see in the search results, so it helps if it has meaning, rather than just a bunch of keywords mashed together. You want visitors to click on the search result, not ignore it as spam.