Where do you start to compile lots of good content that people will want to read about in your industry? Or how do you begin to publish lots of useful content that potential buyers will want to read about to learn more about your product or service? This task is often the reason that a company will delay the process of building valuable links to their site. The search engines rely upon links back to your site to determine the relevancy and usefulness of your content, so without many links your site isn’t going to look very relevant to search queries.
Many Gray/Black hat SEO’s will tell you that this is not a problem because they can simply get your links. This is usually true but it is done in a way that will only spike traffic for a short period of time, bring questionable traffic, and potentially get you the boot from Google and the other search engines. While many of the the black hat SEOs and internet marketers on the web are very smart about manipulating the system, Google knows exactly how they operate and that means you will be left with no valuable links and potentially a ban from the search engine.
So to create the links you need, the ones that are from people and webmasters that find your content useful you need to go the extra distance and create great content. For many firms this seems like an insurmountable task because they are often operating with a fairly static site and no one who has the time or knowledge to create new content. Well to get started you do not need to look far for great content. Here are some areas you may have overlooked but would provide great value to people looking for it.
- Presentations – How many presentations have you given at conferences or other small group events that you have spent many hours preparing and are then forgot in some lost folder on your computer. Well why waste these great presentations that have a lot of very relevant information and insights in them. Simply go back through your list of presentations and do a few edits to protect the innocent or any confidential information and you now have some great content that users may be looking for.
- Sell Sheets – Sell sheets often are great product or service summaries that you leave behind after making a presentation to prospective customers. Sell sheets make great content for the web because they are short and too the point, contain a lot of long tail search terms, and summarize how the product or service works.
- Business Plan – Yes your business plan may have a lot of useful information in it. Business plans usually have a lot of market data in them which will often get their fair share of long tail searches. Like how big the unicycle market is now and how much it is expected to grow over the next 5 years or how current unicycles are sold into stores right now. Also in your business plan you will have a lot of great content on your company and what exactly you do. That type of information can make great content and users interested in your market or product/service will find it helpful when beginning to research their purchase.
- Print Marketing Material – The material you have been sending out in the mail or at your last convention can also be re-purposed for the web. Like sell sheets these materials are usually short and too the point and give searchers what they are looking for quickly. Instead of just archiving that material give it another life on the web and allow other users to find it.
These sources are just the start to creating valuable content for your site and alone probably won’t give you enough for a sustained link building campaign but for a start and to gain momentum they will give you a great head start. If nothing else looking through some of these materials will be the start of some brainstorming for content ideas you may have overlooked.
In the next post I will talk more about each of the content sections and exactly what to look for and how to determine if something may be useful to put online.
On March 8th, 2010,
posted in: Link Building, Search Engine Optimization by dustin Tags: Content Creation, Link Building, SEO
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