SEO TIPS: Content Rules

Seriously, which would you rather visit – a site that has 50 cures for acne, 48 of which are useless, or a site with 2 cures, both of which are valid and working ways to solve your problem? In the first case, you have to sift through, looking for the 2 that work, and eventually getting exasperated and leaving – or in the second case you have what you need right in front of you.

You want high quantities of content, don’t get me wrong. How fast you build it needs to be controlled by quality though. You never want to get so caught up in quantity that you leave quality behind. Make sure that every bit of content you have on your site is valuable to the user. This will aid you over time as Google continues to take user experience into account in their ranking algorithm.

Some people click on the up and down arrows beside Google results, while others report in different ways. You get more organic links if your site is truly helpful. You want these good reports from unbiased users that your site is navigable, easy to use and had the information that they were looking for.

RULE:

Figure out how much content you can produce / afford per month.

Don’t put all of your content out at once. Post your content at equal intervals. This gives people a reason to return regularly to see what is new. If you have four new pages a month, post one per week. If you have ten, post every three days. If you have thirty, post one a day. If you have one hundred twenty, post four per day. The key is being consistent. Set an editoral calendar and stick to it.

While there are several advantages to putting content out in this manner, a big one is that this will space you out well and keep attention coming in the right proportion. Also have an RSS feed to your site so people can be updated on a regular basis. Make it as easy as possible for people to keep up with what you are posting.

You have to look towards optimizing your content  for Search Engines like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft’s BING, but be sure it is relevant and valuable to your customers as well. This will get you the best long term results.

When you concentrate only on getting pages up fast and resort to designing whole sections of your site simply to be stuffed with keywords – that is spamming your own site! How crazy is it to spam yourself? Stop and take a look at what YOU would like to see in a website. If you use consistency and high quality as your guidelines, your site will grow steadily and gain a good reputation for the long term outlook.