Search Engine Marketing Basics: Understanding How to Use Content to Your Advantage

Content is KING. I say it ALL THE TIME – ask anyone…really, go ahead…ask!  It’s very simply one of THE most important aspects to growing your web presence. But there’s a trick – a trick to making content work for you that a lot of individuals in online marketing won’t talk about.

Today’s Wisdom provided by Fairy Godmother Sonya Neblett of Truly Twisted Marketing: (photo by Marianne VanWingerden)

The so called ‘trick’ is simply to understand HOW it works and WHAT the search engines are looking for in content. Once you understand this, you can use it to your advantage and isn’t it nice to have an advantage in growing your business?

What You Need to Know About Search Ranking
How a page ranks in the search engines is determined by that particular page’s attributes such as the number and quality of inbound links (inbound links are links coming from other sites and resources on the web), along with on the page factors such as keyword placement in title tags, copy, headers, etc.
Google (the Big Daddy of all search engines) places the most importance on the type and quality of inbound links you have coming into your site and the meta title tag. Get really good at understanding and using these two aspects of content and you’ll have Google eating out of your hand in no time!

Making Content Work for You
On the other hand, adding content in the form of articles, blog postings, resources, buyer’s guides, etc. can boost up your search rank and ultimately your traffic. What you are doing is creating more indexable content for the search engines to crawl (as well as attracting more links).

Content that is informative and written as a resource (always with your key words and search phrases in mind) also gives your site weight and legitimacy in the ‘eyes’ of the search engines. It’s a winning combination that is simple to employ and so well worth the time and effort.
*A note to remember – pages with few inbound links tend to slip out of the search rankings so you want to make sure the content is good and that people will want to link TO that content.
Now, just as an aside…there ARE ways to update content on the page to direct the search engine spiders to that page and then plant links to pages you want the search engine spiders to discover and index. It does speed up the process of getting new pages listed quicker. It won’t impact your ranking but it will be indexed in the search engines quicker so the content is more available. Your best bet, though, is to get it right the first time.

Misconceptions About How to Use Content
Taking the content of the page and rewriting it on a regular basis will not boost your web site rankings. In fact, it will more than likely pull your ranking down.

*Another note to remember…content SHOULD absolutely be updated/rewritten if it doesn’t contain any of the search phrases you want that particular page to rank for. I happen to see this a lot. Your main search phrases and keywords should also be reflected in your title tag, description and keyword tags up in the meta info in the head section of your site. (Hopefully you know this already…if you don’t we should probably set up some time to have a little chat)

Same goes for streaming an rss feed onto one of your web site pages. It doesn’t impact your ranking. It’s a cool tool and can generate traffic to the feed source but again, does not impact your ranking in the search engines.

Any questions? Post them below or feel free to email me at Truly Twisted Marketing. We love to get a good conversation started!