Tag Archives: Content Writing

What type of content should you publish for an effective link building campaign?

Content writing for link building

Link building is an important part of improving your SEO because it helps Google gather all the “real” recommendations and validations and then evaluate your website or blog accordingly.

You can call it ranking outsourcing.

What is link building?

Link building explained

Many online marketers and SEO experts confuse link building with getting lots of websites to link to your website.

Although, in theory, this is the exact meaning, actually what it means is, having so much valuable content that people want to link to you as a good source of information, or any other form of valuable derivation.

Google, and also some other search engines, realized that it is very easy to manipulate search engines because after all they are a collection of algorithms, and whenever you have algorithms, you always have people who can beat them.

So they started taking human help.

In order to improve your rankings, it is important that more and more people link to your website in appreciation of the content you have published.

Benefits of link building

As mentioned above, search engines like Google want some sort of validation. If many people are linking to you, the search engines assume that you must be publishing great content. This is one reason.

The second reason is that link building creates multiple traffic streams for you. Once you have traffic coming from different sources you no longer solely have to depend on search engine traffic.

Finally, it helps you reach out to more people and people begin to recognize you as an authority figure.

Pitfalls of link building

Pitfalls of content marketing

Link building is a double-edged sword – it can work in your favor and as you must have seen after Penguin and Panda updates, it can also bring disaster to you. It all depends on with what intention people link to you.

So while you’re working on your link building campaign, make sure that your links don’t come from spammy websites because this can totally drop your search engine rankings instead of improving them. Another indication that you may be running a less than legitimate link building campaign is suddenly lots of links coming to you within a few hours or a couple of days. This can also adversely impact your search engine rankings.

From where does content come in and why it is important

As I have repeatedly written on this website don’t create content for just link building and SEO. Your content should provide information about your business or organization. It should explain what your products and services stand for and how your customers and clients benefit from them. The compelling and great traits of your website content are:

It addresses concerns of your prospective customers and clients
It establishes you as an authority
It provides information about your business or organization
It turns your website or blog into a specialized source of information
It gives Google and other search engines more pages and blog posts to crawl, index and rank
It helps you create buzz on social media

Quality content leads to legitimate link building

Since the basic purpose of taking backlinks into consideration while ranking your website is to know how valuable your content is, the most natural way of building back links is creating that valuable content.

Suppose you sell Samsung mobile phones from your website. Do you merely list your inventory or do you also regularly publish blogs and articles explaining why people should purchase these mobile phones, what their salient features are, how they fare better compared to other brands and how various problems can be solved once people start using these phones. Explain to them how they can increase the battery life of their mobile phones, how they can upgrade their operating systems, from where they can get useful apps, how they can make various configurations, and such. This way, whenever someone wants to link to a website containing comprehensive information on Samsung mobile phones, he or she will know it’s your website.

Instead of approaching bloggers and webmasters to link back to you just so that you can improve your search engine rankings (it never works), create enough quality content to encourage them to link to you on their own. This is the real way of link building.

But how do they know about your content? In order to link to your content, first of all they have to find it.

This is where blogger outreach and social media interactions can help you. Initially, when you don’t enjoy good search engine rankings (due to various reasons) it will be difficult for people to find your content and then link to it if they appreciate it. Interact with more and more people on social media, on blogs and on online forums. Don’t just wait for things to happen. You will have to create a schedule. You may even have to hire people to increase your level of networking and interaction. Whenever you create a new blog post or a new article on your website, post it on Facebook, Twitter and Google plus. Encourage people to read it. Pitch your links whenever you think it makes sense (again, don’t spam people’s timelines and blog comment sections).

How I handle repetitive revision requests from content writing clients

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Confused content writing client

I normally don’t charge extra from my clients for multiple revisions. Whenever I undertake a new content writing assignment I let it be known to my clients that although I charge an hourly rate, once I have submitted a document in its complete form from my side, I stop tracking the time and afterwards, if there are some revisions, I don’t charge for that time.

This can be a bit tricky and counterproductive and you have to draw a line somewhere. Why in the first place a document needs to be revised?

It carries lots of errors in terms of wrong data, misspelled words, typos and grammar mistakes
The brief sent by the client is not fully used or is completely ignored
Something more needs to be added to the initial brief sent by the client
Some features need to be added or removed as the client has had a rethink
The copy doesn’t carry the needed punch and the client thinks that it won’t make the desired impact

Most of the reasons mentioned above are not unusual and they happen (first reason being an aberration rather than a reason in its true sense) with almost every content writing and copywriting project. It’s fair enough. It rarely happens that the first draft itself is accepted by the client.

The problem arises when, just because I’m not charging, the client thinks that revisions can go on and on and he or she wants to change the document every second day simply because he or she cannot make up his or her mind. This means the client neither respects his or her own time nor mine. Even if you have to change a single word, 5 minutes is the minimum amount of time it takes to make sense of what the client is trying to convey, open the document, make appropriate changes and then send the revised document again to the client. I don’t charge because I assume that if a document needs to be revised, something goes wrong on my side and hence, I shouldn’t charge.

When do I charge for revising the document?

I normally charge for revisions when a document is completely changed. For instance, I have prepared a document according to the brief sent by the client. I have submitted the document for review and while reviewing the document, the client thinks that he or she sent me wrong information and this was not what he or she intended to say. It means I may have to rewrite the document from scratch. I charge for that time.

I also charge if I need to do extra research. Sometimes the clients says, “simply look up the information on the Internet,” but often it is not as easy as it may sound (or conveniently assumed). Searching the right, verifiable information can take up lots of time. That is why, if the client cannot provide me the right information and I have to look it up myself, I charge for that time, and I convey this to my client.

When do I put a stop?

I have been providing content writing services since 2004 so I have enough experience to know whether a client is non-serious or not. You are not gaining anything by making me revise the document again and again. It either means that you have lots of time on your hand or you are not clear about exactly what you want to communicate, and this is not my problem. You provide me information and according to that information I write your content. If there are some writing mistakes, if the content is not compelling enough, point that out and I will try to rectify it to my utmost capacity. But if you’re simply making me change and revise because you want to view things from different angles, then sorry, it takes lots of my time and I need to put a stop.

Have I ever lost a project because I refused to revise multiple times? I don’t remember actually. I rarely work with senseless clients. I will be frank. The most senseless clients I have encountered are the ones I worked for when I used to develop and design websites. Big time wasters.

Content writing clients are more professional. Maybe this is because it is a newly-emerging field and people who want to hire content writers are anyway serious about their business. They know exactly what they want.

Anyway, would I abandon a project midway just because I don’t want to revise again and again and again? Yes, I would. Instead of wasting my time, I prefer to lose money.

Does your business need a regular dose of content writing and content marketing?

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Should you regularly write and publish content on your website just for the sake of content marketing? Joost de Valk mulls over this question in his recent blog post.

Being a content writer who makes a living off encouraging people to publish as much content as possible I would say yes. Otherwise, I would say, it depends.

I repeatedly write on my website as well as on my blog that don’t write content merely for generating traffic, unless you earn revenue from advertisements (even then relevancy is very important). But I slightly disagree with Joost, and his friend whose post he has referred to. These guys get good traffic on their websites, and they have done their share of content marketing before they can coolly say, “Oh I hate terms like content marketing and content publishing!”

This is precisely the reason I tell my clients not to take rampant advise on the Internet too seriously, and literally. If you need traffic, you need content, and you keep on writing and publishing content until you have traffic, and then, if you think you have had enough content (on your own website as well as other websites) to get web traffic for a couple of years, may be you too one day can say, “Please spare me your ‘content’.”

Fundamentally I’m not disagreeing with the central theme these two gentlemen are talking about. Useless content is, well, useless. Write something meaningful, and if you are really involved in your work, when you really confront problems and work on solutions, you have something or the other to write about.

So does your business need regular content writing to keep the engine of your content marketing running, or at least humming? In order to understand this you have to understand why you need regular content writing for your website in the first place?

You need search engine traffic that actually converts
You need to establish your expertise
You need to engage with your audience
You want people to link to your content

There can be umpteen reasons why you may require regular content writing (just as some people and business may not require this much regularity). The unavoidable truth is, if your business doesn’t enjoy a strong presence on the web (search engine and social media) you need to publish regularly. You need to write content for recognition, in order to cover all your keywords, in order to generate longtail traffic and if nothing else, then just to keep your visitors engaged with fresh, thought-provoking content. If you say your business doesn’t require content, so be it. There are some businesses that don’t require the Internet and websites.

Search Engine Optimization with Better Content Writing

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Yesterday Business2Community posted my blog post, “Search Engine Optimization with Content Writing” in which I talk about how you can organically improve your search engine rankings by creating better, useful content rather than resorting to unreliable, the so-called, “SEO tactics”. Although there is nothing wrong in making your website SEO-friendly in terms of layout and source code, eventually it is your content writing, at least right now and in the foreseeable future, it is your textual content that ultimately impacts your search engine optimization results.

Should you write content merely for search engine optimization?

Why not? And not necessarily. There is nothing wrong in writing content that helps you improve your search engine rankings. The problem arises when you’re creating content merely for that purpose. That’s when things begin to go wrong. Then you lose your priority and you end up alienating your core audience. Search engine optimization and consequently, rankings become more important to you than providing the right, useful information to your visitors. Getting massive traffic from search engines doesn’t help you much if there is very low or no conversion rate. This, whether you realize it sooner or later, negatively affects your search engine rankings. This is because…

You need people to link back to you
You need to establish your authority
People should feel encouraged to share your content on their social media and social networking timelines

Since all these are voluntary acts, they won’t happen unless you create quality content. Why would people link to you (unless you pay them, and this no longer works) unless they find your information useful and unless it adds value to their own website or blog?

Similarly, you establish your authority by sharing expert advice people can actually use to take their businesses, their personal lives, and even their experiences, to the next level. Building your personal brand these days is a big part of search engine optimization and this can only happen with sustained content writing. Now, when I mention “sharing expert advice” it doesn’t mean that you metamorphose into an expert overnight. It is an ongoing process. You gain knowledge and you grow intellectually as you share more and more with your readers. It doesn’t always have to be advice, you just need to remain in touch, and whenever inspiration hits you, you share something worthy with your readers.

Regarding content writing for search engine optimization, aside from being useful, it helps if you organize your content structure in such a manner that it is easier for the search engine crawlers and ranking algorithms to figure out what you are talking about. It entails using your keywords – both your main keywords as well as longtail keywords – strategically, at proper locations. As I have mentioned in the guest blog post, your primary keyword should appear in the title of your webpage or blog post. If possible, it should also appear in the first paragraph and within the headline tags. If you can manage, while writing content, you can also use your primary keywords as well as longtail keywords in a bulleted list.

Anyway, you can head to the Business2Community link to read my blog post over there and don’t forget to share it.

Why you can’t ignore content marketing as an SEO expert

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The title of this blog post comes with a touch of irony. I address you as an SEO expert and then I try to explain why you cannot ignore content marketing. But it is not a complete irony – I still come across well-meaning SEO professionals who think that content is important, but it is optional and good search engine rankings don’t necessarily depend on good content. So this blog post is for them.

You may also like to read Why SEO companies are putting more stress on content writing?.

What exactly is SEO? Is it merely getting good search engine rankings? I remember once a client came to my office and requested me to set his website as my homepage so that every time I loaded my browser, it would increase his visitors count. I asked him what he was trying to achieve by that, and he said, it would instill confidence in his other visitors. When I asked him what effect a higher visitor count had made to his business, he flatly said, “None.” SEO hadn’t become a buzzword back then and nobody on this planet had heard of social media.

Why your SEO needs a healthy dose of content marketing?

I’m not an SEO expert but over the past 12 years that I have spent eking out a living on the Internet I have found out that there are 4 things that decide your search engine rankings

The quality of your content
General well-being of your website
The quality of your incoming links
The level of competition you face

The recent addition, the fifth thing that has an impact on your search engine rankings, is your author rank – how much social relevance your name enjoys on the Internet.

The relation between content marketing and SEO

What are people doing when they are using the search engines? They are looking for content in the form of information or entertainment. They seek information to keep them aware, to educate themselves, for researching, to find product or service they need, and to make good buying decisions.

Suppose you get good rankings for “garden sprinkling system” but when people come to your website they cannot make out what you are trying to do. The content is not convincing. Or it is full of errors. Maybe you haven’t highlighed the greatest benefits of the sprinkling system. Are you merely providing information or you want people to buy from you? And if they should buy from you then why? Just because you have got good search engine rankings or your sprinkling system is actually better than the others? People don’t do business because of your search engine rankings; they buy from you when your written content, your copywriting, is able to engage them and convince them.

This is just one aspect of content marketing. Once you have written credible and convincing content you also need to make it accessible to as many prospective visitors as possible.

The relationship between content marketing and quality incoming links

The days of paid links are gone, or going. Google heavily penalizes websites that aggregate incoming links by either paying for them or through link-exchange schemes. People should link to you for the value you provide, in terms of content or branding. Two legitimate ways of getting quality and reliable incoming links are:

Website owners, authors and bloggers voluntarily linking to you
You write for other websites and blogs and your link appears in the small bio or profile on the same link as credit

In both the cases you need high-quality content. If people voluntarily link to you then they must find something worth linking to. If you write for other blogs and websites then too, they won’t publish your blog posts and articles unless they are of a certain standard.

So you can see, whether you are focusing on onsite or off-site SEO, ultimately it’s the combination of the quality of your content and a well-coordinated content marketing strategy that decides what sort of search engine rankings you are going to experience.