Tag Archives: Search Engine Optimization

Why content marketing is important for your business

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Content marketing is a misunderstood terminology. It has got nothing to do with conventional marketing where you keep on pushing your messages and then wait for response.

There is often some confusion regarding why you need content regularly and why it needs to be marketed through proper channels. Unlike your brick and mortar business, the game is totally different on the web. You cannot compete on the Internet on the strength of your money, market reach and off-line reputation. You need to have a presence, and you need to have a convincing presence, and only high-quality content gives you that presence.

On your website or your blog, you cannot directly communicate with your visitors unless you are constantly online and are using a webcam or a chat interface to talk to individual visitors (this is feasible, but only up to a certain point). Your web pages, and what they contain, become your representatives, your voice on your online presence. So your content helps you communicate.

But this is not the only reason you require ongoing content and subsequent content marketing. You also require content to

  • Strengthen and establish your brand
  • Generate traffic from social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook
  • Improve your search engine rankings
  • Establish yourself as an authority
  • Keep your visitors/customers/clients informed
  • Provide answers to the most common questions regarding your business
  • Keep on communicating with your prospective and present customers and clients so that they remember you when they need the product or the service you provide
  • Give your visitors a reason to visit your website or blog regularly

Why content marketing

After you start publishing on your website, people need to know about it. Since there are zillions of pages and blog posts on the Internet it is practically impossible to publish 50-60 odd web pages or blog posts and then expect the traffic to pour down from all over the Internet. Some people may have 500-600 web pages or blog posts, and some may even have thousands of them. So in terms of quantity and quality, you are in a constant competition on the Internet, and the good thing is you need to compete constantly. Why I say this is a good thing is because then everybody gets a chance to compete on the strength of his or her ability to produce and market high-quality content. This way, even while working from your basement, in your undergarments, you can compete with as big a company as Forbes by producing better content and marketing it properly.

In order to compete, along with publishing relevant information you also need to market it. You need to highlight it and promote it where people can see it. Here are a few things you can do in the effort of content marketing without spending much money:

  • Search engine optimize your content: Although this comes under search marketing, basically it is content marketing. With the help of your content you are trying to promote your business on various search engines. If you are able to optimize your content, it is going to rank well on major and minor search engines and this can bring you tons of traffic. Choose the right keywords, pack your articles and blog posts with as much information as possible, and make them as helpful as possible.
  • Write for other websites and blog posts: You can publish articles on article directories (although they are losing their charm over search engine rankings because there are 100s of such article directories). A better thing to do is write blog posts as guest blogger for reputed blogs. This might not be easy so first you will have to interact on the blogs and let the blog publishers become familiar with you. Many start-up companies use this content marketing tactic with great success by publishing blog posts on tech blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch.
  • Maintain an active social media presence: This may include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or YouTube. These days your website may get traffic from multiple sources and you need to maintain a vibrant presence over these places. Regularly interact with your friends and followers on social networking websites and generate content for social media websites like YouTube and Tumblr. Lots of content is shared and passed around using these platforms and you never know which of your links might go viral.

These are but a few ways you can carry out your content marketing effort. As mentioned above, content marketing is important for your business because first of all content is important for your business, and second, you need to make as many people aware of the existence of your content as possible.

How Not To Depend Much On Search Engines

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Traffic without search engines

95% of my writing business depends on search engine traffic. This is a dangerous situation. What if something happens – some change in the ranking algorithms, something that is not liked at my website – and my listings vanish from the search engine result pages? Does this mean I should pack my bags? Although I can start all over again and try to get back into the search engine results but this is a very shaky situation and I am sure many of you too are faced with the same dilemma. What is the best way to deal with such a situation?

Let us accept that the search engines are very powerful promotional tools and they should never be excluded from your Internet marketing effort, but they should never be the sole suppliers of your traffic. With millions of websites scattered all over the Internet it is not too ambitious to try to get some traffic from these websites directly. I will again emphasize that you can get the best traffic from search engines because when people come from search engines they are already looking for a specific search term and this may not happen if they are coming directly from a website. But then the advantage of getting traffic from a website is that a person clicks on your link fully knowing where he or she is heading to. So how can you generate traffic outside of the search engines? Here are a few thoughts; you are welcome to add yours.

Publish a blog

Regularly publishing a blog is the best way of driving high-quality traffic to your website without having to depend on search engines. Although blogs get tons of traffic from search engines due to the way they are published, a lot of traffic also comes from other websites and blogs and this is an advantage not enjoyed by conventional websites. People are constantly linking to blog posts, commenting about them, commenting on them and recommending them to their readers and friends. There are even many social bookmarking websites just to promote blog content among various readers and blog publishers. In few instances some bloggers have been blocked by the search engines (that is, their links didn’t show up on the search result pages) for violating various rules but the blockage didn’t affect them much although they did notice it and wrote about it. The mere act of writing about the blockage got them hundreds of thousands of hits from other blogs and websites. They couldn’t have generated such massive traffic merely from search engines. Once your blog has crossed the popularity threshold you don’t have to worry much about search engine traffic.

Have quality content on your website or blog

Interesting content draws crowds to your blog or website. People not only read the content they also like to link to it whenever possible, and if they are really impressed they put a permanent link to your blog on their blog or website. Quality content also enhances your credibility and people begin to trust you for your opinion. You get tons of repeat traffic. Great content also encourages your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feeds and this also helps you increase and maintain your readership – this readership doesn’t have to depend on search engines to find your blog and consume your content and consequently, generate business for you.

Be active on social media websites, online forums and blogs

We live in a conversation economy; lots of business is generated by encouraging conversation between buyers and sellers. But this is just one small aspect of social media marketing. What you are actually doing is establishing long-lasting relationships with different individuals. You don’t necessarily have to do it for a selfish reason because being social means giving more than taking. Be useful to people and people will be useful to you. Be an interesting person, be a resourceful person and people won’t take you as a business bug. Try to interact with people through Twitter, FaceBook, Tumblr, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. Often it is not possible to track conversations on all social media websites so just focus on a couple or even a single website but do it thoroughly and establish yourself there as an authority. Network with as many people as possible.

Similarly, constructively interact on various online forums because you can get lots of quality traffic from these forums. Don’t spam and don’t leave meaningless comments just to leave your links because this doesn’t work; people don’t click your link if they don’t like what you have written. You should also leave comments on other blogs to let people know about the existence of your blog or website. But make sure that you add value to the ongoing discussion and this means read the content present on the blog or website carefully, think about it, and only then add your opinion.

Distribute your content to blogs and websites

There are many blogs that would eagerly accept your guest posts provided you have written something really worth reading and captivating. When these bloggers publish your blog post, what is known as guest blog post, they often put a small profile of yours under the post or over it with the link connecting to your blog or website.

Similarly you can submit succinct, useful articles to various websites and article submission websites. These article submission websites draw lots of traffic from search engines; this way you can get indirect traffic from search engines in case your own website or blog vanishes from there.

Include your link in your e-mail signature

This might not look like much but you never know where your e-mail may end up and who might click on the link you have included in your signature. And anyway having a link is a lot better than not having it. This can be really effective if you send out lots of e-mails on a regular basis.

Publish a newsletter

In terms of the Internet this is one of the oldest surviving modes of communicating with your visitors. When they visit your website encourage investors to subscribe to your newsletter so that they can receive regular updates from you. Although this can be same as subscribing to your RSS feeds but your newsletter is a bit different – people don’t need an RSS reader first of all to read your updates, and second, it will be difficult for you to publish everything on your blog; sometimes you need to communicate only through e-mail. Publishing a newsletter is one of the greatest ways of getting tons of highly targeted traffic to your website without having to depend on search engines.

Do share on this blog if you are aware of more methods of generating targeted traffic to your website or blog without search engines.

What impact will Google Instant have on your organic search engine results

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If you keep a tab on the latest Internet trends you must have noticed the hoopla surrounding the new feature Google introduced a couple of days ago. It is called Google Instant. Now when you search on Google the search results are updated as you type in your query. You no longer need to click the search button (although eventually you can click). Even as you type in individual alphabets the search results are updated according to the search string you have entered so far.

Google instant search results

Many website owners are apprehensive about this new feature and they fear that it is going to disturb their search engine rankings. Is it really going to happen?

According to Google the latest feature does not affect your search engine rankings, it simply makes it easier for its users to find the information they are looking for by instantly showing the results. This will save people lots of time because they won’t have to enter the entire string and then click the search button.

Search engines after all are more concern for the convenience of their users rather than worrying about the nightmares they unleash upon web masters, bloggers and search engine marketers.

Since Google Instant has no effect on your search engine rankings you shouldn’t worry about that. It may change though, the way people process the information they obtain out of the search. Since they no longer have to type in the complete query they may never end up searching the keywords you might be aiming for. Suppose you have optimized a particular web page for “sizzling seekh kebabs instantly delivered”. You rank at the top for this expression and lap up most of the traffic due to this. But through Google Instant your prospective customers may get distracted while they are typing “sizzling see” or even something shorter.

Similarly if you rank well for “freelance writer in L.A.” you may lose some of your visitors if they find something useful while typing just “freelance writer”. What does this mean?

You will definitely need to appear faster and preferably among the first 5 search results for your important keywords and search phrases. You will need lots of content not only on your own website but also on other websites so that you have enough presence to cover most keyword combinations and consequently appear faster on the search engine result pages.

This new development may also work to your advantage without taking extra steps. Due to immediate processing lots of results will be highlighted that were not previously been shown due to longer queries.

Should you do something? Ideally you should always be doing something in order to remain ahead of the competition: there is so much to be done in terms of staying connected through social media and networking websites, publishing your blog regularly and continuously trying to improve your search engine rankings, irrespective of what features Google or some other search engines introduce. Other than that, if you are not doing much it means you are anyway not proactively promoting your business and hence you should wait and watch. Carefully observe the traffic you are getting and how it is impacting your business. If you are getting more business, well and good. If it hasn’t made much of a difference then too it is good. If it is having an adverse effect then you must take some steps, for instance:

  • Evaluate your website for SEO problems
  • Analyze your present conversion rate
  • Mmake note of what sort of content you have on your website and how it can be improved
  • Start exploring other sources of traffic such as submitting your articles to article directories, websites and blogs
  • Enhance your presence on social media and social networking websites
  • Generate more content on your area of interest and business
  • Try to improve your current rankings
  • Make a list of alternative keywords that can fetch you traffic
  • Stay in touch with your existing customers and clients

Now, I’m not saying that you should follow these steps just because Google has changed the way it displays search results; they should anyway be followed. They will certainly help if Google Instant has affected your search engine traffic, at least from Google.

How come targeted content improves your search engine rankings?

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If you ask me SEO content is actually targeted content, and if you are wondering what is targeted content it is content specifically generated for a particular audience using particular keywords (and that’s what makes it SEO content). Purely SEO content doesn’t do you much good because even if it generates lots of traffic it doesn’t generate much business because it doesn’t move your visitors. Targeted content on the other hand not only draws qualified traffic from various search engines it also improves your conversion rate.

A couple of weeks ago I removed a package that I had started offering from my website. I had collaborated with a writer (a content provider, actually, who hires writers to generate bulk content) to provide low-cost, average-quality content that could help clients improve their search engine rankings. I started offering this package because I was getting lots of queries from India and I also got contacted by a few writers who were ready to generate lots of content at very low rates. This worked for a while but then I felt it was counterproductive for my clients and also for my own business.

I am not a very well-known copywriter on the Internet but over the past five years I have managed to eke out a presence through providing quality content persistently. Since there are very few people who understand the difference between cost and value a majority of clients confused that package with the overall content writing services that I provide.

They somehow got themselves into believing that they could pay dirt cheap and still they should be able to use that content as primary business content.

Content purely written for SEO rarely performs well as primary business content and if you want primary business content then you must pay accordingly. Anyway, it is very difficult to explain to clients once they have seen the rates. Instead of wasting my time again and again trying to explain the difference between quality content and low-cost SEO your content I stopped offering that package altogether.

Instead, I insist — even if they have to pay a bit more — that they should aim at producing highly targeted content. They may end up with less content than what they could have gotten by paying a lower rate, performance wise this content is much better.

But how does targeted content improve your search engine rankings?

In order to produce targeted content you need to be clear about two things, in fact three things:

  • What exactly you want to convey
  • To whom you want to convey
  • What words you want to use

Once you have sorted out these questions you are more than halfway through producing high-quality SEO content that can also be used as your primary business content. When you write content keeping your audience in mind you are careful about what you’re writing and how you are writing. When you know what you want to convey you stick to the topic and stay away from ambivalence. The words that you want to use while creating your content are your keywords and the search terms you want to target.

Although you should arrange your content so that it is more convenient for the search engine crawlers to go through it and assess it, your primary focus must always be your visitors, your readers. Search engines are not going to do business with you but people will.

SEO Content writing actually improves your search engine rankings

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Does SEO content writing improve your rankings

Does SEO content writing improve your rankings

Does SEO content writing actually improve your search engine rankings?

You may like to read 5 Reasons Why Content Writing Is Important for SEO

Although, whenever my clients ask me this question, I tell them that SEO content writing alone doesn’t improve search engine rankings but it is the underpinning of every SEO strategy.

Unless you have good content, you’re not going to enjoy better search rankings. There is a reason.

Over the years, an increasing number of organizations and content creators have realized that merely using keywords here and there doesn’t help much in improving one’s search engine rankings.

You need to provide useful information. You must write content that is relevant to what your target audience is looking for. Only then you can improve your SEO.

What do millions of Internet users access everyday while surfing the Internet?

They access the content present on various websites.

What do people promote day in and day out on various social media and networking websites?

They promote content links.

So it’s clear that everything is about content, whether it exists in the form of text, video or images.

Since everybody is seeking content, how do you create content that’s actually being sought?

And if you create content that is highly sought after, how do you let people know of its existence?

This is where SEO content writing can help you.

What does content actually mean?

Whatever exists digitally on the Internet is content

Whatever exists digitally on the Internet is content

As I have explained elsewhere on this blog, whatever information exists, it is content. It can be text, it can be video, it can be images, it can be PDFs, it can be social media updates – anything that can be read, heard or viewed, is content.

This TopRank blog post has compiled responses from 40 content marketers and content writers to get a perspective on what is content. For example, according to Heidi Cohen,

Content is high quality, useful information that conveys a story presented in a contextually relevant manner with the goal of soliciting an emotion or engagement. Delivered live or asynchronously content can be expressed using a variety of formats including text, images, video, audio and/or presentations. When used for marketing purposes, content should incorporate the organization’s branding, be void of any form of promotion, and use a call-to-action to be trackable.

According to data analyst Avinash Kaushik

Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life. It can add value by making them smarter, making them laugh, making them do their job better, rush to their child to share the video, make a contribution to a charity.

How important are the keywords for SEO content writing?

Whether people are using search engines, online directories or social networking websites to dig out relevant information, one thing is common that they use: the keywords, the search terms.

There are many Internet “gurus” that say SEO is fast becoming irrelevant. They say that the keywords are losing their meaning.

There are many reasons for such opinions. One of the reasons is that these days more stress is put on the relevance of your content.

The artificial intelligence used by the search engine algorithms can understand your content even when you don’t use your keywords. It can make sense of the words by combining multiple words and multiple sentences and then deriving the meaning on its own.

Consequently, you should just focus on the quality and the relevance of your content.

Although I completely agree with the quality and the relevance thing, I think the keywords still matter. They’re going to matter for a long time.

Another reason for discounting SEO is that people these days are using social media and social networking websites to search for information.

This can be true for website like LinkedIn but finding business-related information on Facebook and Twitter or Instagram can be really daunting.

People are still using search engines when they want to find business-related information or when they are looking for products and services.

On social media and social networking websites they may stumble upon a bit of useful information, but they don’t actively use their search functions.

Search still means search engines like Google and Bing.

Does only SEO content writing help you improve your search engine rankings?

While SEO writing is the most important ingredient (it’s like the pasta in your pasta dish) what sort of rankings your content enjoys depends on many factors. Some of these include

  • The authority your website or blog currently wields.
  • The age of your domain.
  • The number of authority incoming links.
  • Your existing content quality.
  • Your existing content density.
  • The optimization of your source code.
  • Your engagement level on social media and social networking websites.
  • The frequency with which you publish fresh content and update existing content.
  • The way content is organized on your website or blog.
  • The level and the quality of competition your content faces on search engines.

SEO content writing is not just about outsmarting the search engines.

It’s about talking in the right language and using the right words; words people actually use.

If I’m writing about SEO content writing, and if nowhere on my page this phrase appears (let’s say all the time I’m talking about getting more search engine traffic — a good thing to do actually, but here I’m just explaining the expressions and their relevance) how can the search engines find my page when people are looking for SEO content writing?

So it’s very important that you figure out:

  • What’s your target market
  • What search terms and expressions they actually use
  • What they’re actually looking for
  • How to incorporate the data into your entire SEO content writing process

There is a concept called search task accomplishment. What does it mean?

Google these days does not rank your content based on how you have used your keywords. Though, keywords are still important, Google ranks your content based on what purpose it is solving.

To accomplish this, it takes into account the way people react to your content.

The logic is very simple. When someone finds your link on Google and clicks the link and goes to your website, does he or she find the information he or she is looking for?

If he or she comes back to Google and carries on with the same search, it tells Google that he or she didn’t find the information he or she was looking for and hence, he or she needs to look more.

On the other hand, if he or she doesn’t carry on the same search, it tells Google that your content accomplished the task for which it was created and hence, this particular link gets a ranking boost.

How does SEO content writing improve your search engine rankings

A lot of your success on the Internet depends on getting found, if you don’t have millions of dollars to spend on advertising.

You may like to read search engine optimization guidelines by Google.

According to Google guidelines, your content should be

  • Useful and informative.
  • Valuable and useful compared to other websites.
  • Credible and trustworthy.
  • High quality.
  • Engaging.

Search engine optimization is definitely a good start and when you include keyword targeting in your overall SEO content writing strategy it helps the search engine ranking algorithms compute the relevance according to the searches being conducted.

It has a circular effect:

SEO content writing

SEO content writing

As you can see in the diagram, with the right start, one thing leads to another and it goes on and on.

But is it this simple? Of course its not.

SEO content writing has to be matched with relevancy — it must provide solutions and answers.

Suppose someone wants to know what smart phone she should buy?

Simply optimizing your content for iPhone or Google Pixel or OnePlus isn’t going to be of much help and if it isn’t going to be of much help people are neither going to link to it nor going to promote it.

Unless your content really helps her decide, it’s of no relevance, and even if it appears on the first pages of various search engines (flukes do happen), it neither benefits you nor your visitors.

Create few SEO content pages, but create highly relevant pages.

This is where everything begins.

If you start focusing on every keyword under the sun and start generating tons of directionless traffic it’s not going to benefit you, and you’ll end up concluding that SEO content writing doesn’t work.

Instead, focus on a few search terms and create highly relevant content around them. Just in a couple of months you’ll notice a marked difference and you will find that SEO content writing definitely improves your search engine rankings.

Note: This blog post was updated on March 30, 2020.