Content is Still King
In today’s search engine optimization world, filled with countless amounts of advanced techniques, the old saying “content is king” still holds true. Maybe not in the same context that it used to, but the fact still remains that unique content creation is one of the best things you can do to positively impact your SEO campaign.
Clients are always asking me, “what can I do to assist you?” and I usually tell them, write me blog post or new content for pages to add to the site. Most of the time time I think they feel I am just giving them busy work to get them off my back, but honestly I think that it is one of the best things you can do to help your own website.
If You Don’t Have a Blog, You Should!
First things first, if you don’t currently have a blog on you site, ADD ONE! Even if you only add 1 post every month or every other month, it can have a huge positive impact on you SEO. However, I am almost certain that once you start writing blogs and see how much additional traffic you start gaining with such little work, you will start contributing much more often.
I have written blog posts that continue to drive hundreds of clicks to my sites each month, even years later! Of course having it optimized and properly linked around targeted keywords helps, but the reality is that it doesn’t need to be optimized to work. In fact, with most blogging software you can easily install plugins/add-ons that do a good job optimizing them automatically. I personally recommend Wordpess, it is a great blogging software with a ton of easy to use SEO plugins.
Content Must Be Unique
When it comes to writing content there are many factors that will make the difference from good and bad rankings in the search engine. But the most important thing is that it is unique! If you copy content from other websites or you duplicate it on several pages you will get dinged for duplicate content and it will not rank. You can get away with copying some of the content, but I always recommend at least rewriting to ensure you don’t get penalized.
Keyword Inclusion Recommendations
As long as your content is unique there is a good chance that you will get some traffic for it. However, you can increase the amount of traffic your post gets, by doing some keyword research (Google’s AdWords Tool is a good free option) and including it in your content. At ShopLine Commerce we are constantly testing and determining an ideal keyword density to use in our campaigns and while I cannot just give you our data, I will share with you some overall guidelines that will give you an advantage over your customers. When writing content with a length of 100 to 300 words targeting only 1 to 2 keywords and try to include each keyword 2 to 3 times. With a total length of 200 to 400 words target 2 to 4 keywords using each keyword 1 to 3 times and so on.
Content Works Around The Clock
The main reason that content is still one of the best things that you can do for your ecommerce marketing efforts is because once posted it is always working for you rain or shine, day or night, during the Superbowl, etc. When your content is added to your site, it will get indexed by the search engines and then available for people searching. Your new content and/or blog post probably won’t rank for really competitive keywords like “diamonds”, but it will rank for some long tail keywords.
Lets say for example you write a post on how to check the clarity of diamond, now if someone searches “How to check the clarity of a diamond?” your site may come up on top in the search engine and chances are that person will now be visiting your site. And if you are a company that sell diamonds rings and that person is doing research because they are looking to buy a diamond ring, now you have them on your site and they can potentially become a sale. On that note, let me also mention that it is always good to write your headers as question. This is because people often search in the form of questions and having a line or a header in your post that exactly matches there search will drastically increase your chance of ranking.
Furthermore, you are an expert in your industry and chances are your post will be informative and interesting, which can result in someone linking to your post, which also positively impact your SEO campaign.
To summarize, if you are looking for something to do to help out your online marketing efforts, specifically SEO, write something unique! It will work for you around the clock bringing you targeted traffic and attracting links, from the day you post it until the day people no longer use search engines (which I think is say to say wont be for quite a while).
