Creating Content with Questions
One of the best pieces of content that you can write for your site is to answer the questions being asked by your market. The obvious target is your potential customers that you are trying to sell to. If you can answer their questions then you become an expert in their eyes and if you have a product or service that you say can solve their problem then you have built up the trust needed to get them to purchase.
The other group of people whose questions you should target are site owners in general, but site owners in your industry are even better. This group can drive links to your site and if it's a related niche they might be able to drive targeted traffic of prospects as well.
So where do you find the questions that need answered? There are a couple of different sources that I look at.
Yahoo is a great resource. You can either type in your keywords into the search box and see what comes up or you can navigate down into a specific category if one covers your niche. These are real questions from real people and if the questions are current enough, you can even write the post on your site answering the question, then respond to the asker by giving a summary with a link back to your site.
Forums
People also ask their questions in forums. Some forums even have a section with frequently asked questions, which is a great place to get content ideas that can bring you some search traffic. Look for how many times and different ways a question is asked. Take a look at any replies to make sure you know the answer that the poster is looking for or if there are any different angles to consider.
How do you find the forums? Do a google search for "(keyword) forums" and see what comes up. Not all forums are optimized for the search engines though and some high traffic hangouts can go under the radar. You can find these sites by looking at related sites to the forums that you do find. SimilarSites, Google Trends, and the related links section at Alexa are ways you can find other forums.
You can use the Twitter search feature or their advanced search to find questions people are asking right now. What's great about answering questions on Twitter is if you give someone an answer, they are likely to become a follower. Plus, you give a short answer with a link back to your site. This gets potential customers to your site and at the start of the sales funnel.
WordTracker
Just type in a keyword into their Keyword Questions tool and it will spit out the 100 most popular questions asked around the keyword using the question modifiers of who, what, where, when, how and other question-related terms.
The best questions to answer are presell questions. How to use a product or service, which one is better for a certain feature, and how well it solves a specific problem are all good answers to provide.
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What is Link Bait
Link baiting is a very popular way to give your search engine optimization efforts a boost. The process of creating an effective link baiting campaign is fairly complex but I'll try to break it down to the simplest level. Link baiting is a term used to cover a lot of different methods but the goal for each process is the same: get more incoming links to your website. A piece of link bait is a page or series of pages that are designed to attract those links.
With link bait you are not really trying to get people to use your desired anchor text on a landing page that you want to rank highly in the search engines. In fact, you shouldn't really care if these pages rank highly for any particular keywords at all (unless that would help you generate more links). The most important goal of link baiting is to simply build more authority or trust in your site by gaining quality of links from external domains (preferably from quality, trusted sites). Of course, it wouldn't hurt if you build up your reputation, gain traffic, increase your subscriber or follower counts, or sell some products with the process either.
Different webmasters have different views on link bait. The problem is that with so many different types of link bait out there it's easy to like one way of doing it and despise how other people do it. I'll go over link baiting techniques in a different article, but if you are creating quality content like lists, polls, breaking news, or in-depth research then you are making the web a better place and should be rewarded.
Other people out there spread false rumors, bash people without reason, or run bad contests. Those sites and webmasters I do have a problem with and would never reward them with any kind of a link, even if it's to tell everyone what a scam they are.
To summarize, link bait is simply a section on your site that you create to generate incoming links to in order to build your site's reputation. You don't worry about what anchor text is passed.
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Keyword Density
Keyword density has been a hot topic in years past when webmasters were trying to figure out how to get their pages to the top of the search engine results. Back in the 90's some people were worried about keyword density, prominence, variations, and all other kinds of non-sense. The "magic number" that you wanted to use for a benchmark seemed to fluctuate daily.
With the modern algorithms, density is something that can probably hurt you but not help you. You don't want to stuff your keyword into your content a bunch of times. If you are over-using the term you are targeting then you can harm your rankings or get the page de-indexed from the results completely.
With that being said, you don't want to ignore it completely. Here are some basics that I use for working my keywords into the content:
- Make sure the keyword appears once in the copy. This makes sense since if the article you are writing doesn't have the keyword included in it somewhere, then how can it even be relevant?
- Include the keyword in the title.
- The URL or permalink should include the keyword.
- The H1 tag should include the keyword.
Those four principles are really all I think you should worry about. When writing the copy for your blog or website you don't want to force the usage of a keyword with the notion that it is going to help you rank better. What it probably will do is turn off your visitors as they wonder if the person who wrote it is either a robot or on the lower end of the intelligence scale.
If you write quality content you are going to be better off in the long run. People will think higher of your site or brand, have a higher chance of subscribing to your RSS feed, newsletter, or interact with you on social networks, and they will refer others to your site as a source of expert opinions in the field. These benefits far outweigh trying to get as many people to your site as possible, only to have a higher percentage of them click their browser's back button after reading a few sentences of mindless drivel on your site.
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Content Audit After Google’s Panda Update
There are a lot of webmasters that were affected by Google's latest update to the algorythm. I was one of them as two of my sites saw around a 40% drop in the traffic received from Google's organic search. It's still early, but after reading as much as I could about the different sites that were affected and testing those findings against what I found with my sites I decided to make a few changes.
The Old Way
Previously, I had a couple of sites that were listed in Google News. For these sites, my content strategy was focused more on producing in bulk. We tried to get to around 300 words of unique content centered around our niche and the hot topics currently going on. I wanted my writers to fly through and get as much content posted as possible. As a result we saw huge spikes in traffic when something was picked up, but I'd say that the traffic was fairly low quality. I had recently decided to move towards more evergreen content and less news related stuff since the conversion rates were so much higher. However, I had a lot of articles on my site with a low word count.
The Content Audit
The keyword centered around this Panda update has been "quality." Now my short news stories were all uniquely written and covered what they needed to cover, almost always with links pointing to more detailed sources.
The problem was that they were very "thin" because of their shortness. Since Google is looking for more detailed, thoroughly researched content I decided to go through and delete everything under 500 words long. I thought 500 words was the safest choice, but if there was a piece of content under 500 words that I thought was useful, had links, and was high traffic then I marked it for an update instead of deleting it.
Step 1: Delete all posts under 500 words long (or shorter if you aren't comfortable with this number.)
Next, I knew that I had a pretty poor incoming link count in relation to how many pages were on my site (check Webmaster Tools for you incoming link count). The true sign of "quality" is supposedly having other webmasters linking to your content with the understanding that other sites won't link to crap.
Since I was producing so much stuff, I didn't really worry too much about working on building links to my site and thus have a lot of pages with no incoming links. I didn't want to get rid of everything without an incoming link though because I thought if it's useful, I can at least try to work on getting some links to it.
The final step I took was to pull up Google Analytics and look at my traffic numbers. If a page had received less than 100 visitors over the past year, then it's not doing a lot for me and was a candidate for deletion.
Step 2: Delete all posts with 0 incoming links and less than 100 visitors over the past year
One of my two sites lost more traffic than the other. The site with the biggest traffic loss I feel like was benefiting more from the authority given to large sites. It's not that I was penalized as much as I had a lot of links passing anchor text juice to my landing pages. On that site I didn't have as many external links coming in to those landing pages, and saw a huge drop as a result.
Step 3: Work on getting more links to your content
I'm writing more guest posts and am engaging more in the community in the hopes of getting more links to my sites. I'll let you know how this pans out.
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Content Marketing Strategy
We have been talking a lot about content lately from what the strategy should be on your site and it's place in learning article marketing. The fact of the matter is that if you want to make money online you need to have a lot of quality content. I like to think of this as a marathon and not a sprint. It's going to take time to build up your article count and to generate backlinks to your site, but if you keep building it pretty soon you are going to have a viable online business that will keep generating cash for you in the long run.
How Much Can You Produce
The first question to ask yourself is how much content per week can you produce. If you have a full-time job and are using your nights and weekends to build up your site, then five posts per week might be all you can handle. If that is the case you want to make sure three of those articles get posted to your site or blog and the other two you syndicate to the article directories.
If you are working on your site full-time then you can probably crank out more content. Writing a new post once per day on your site will help you quickly build up your site. Doing a few re-writes of the articles that you submit to the directories will keep those sites happy and help you get a little more link juice out of the content.
The more sites that you build relationships with that are authoritative, the more content you are going to produce outside of your site. So if you have time to write more than 10 articles per week it might be a good idea to use that time to comment on other blogs, answer questions in the forums, and get your name out there so you can actually land some guest posting spots.
Consistency
For your site you want to post consistently. If people think you are writing about something new each and every day but then you take a one week break, they might be lost forever. If it's understand that you post every Friday then they know what to expect.
With the article directories posting at least once per week will help you to start getting your name out there. This will help you build your incoming link profile consistently through time. I don't like doing batches. A real site owner might look through only the last few days of recent articles when they are looking for something to post on their site and if you do a heavy batch and disappear for awhile you might miss out on being able to build a relationship with quality site owners.
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Content Creation Ideas
A popular phrase when it comes to Internet marketing, SEO, and making money online is that "content is king." In some ways it is very true because if you want traffic from the search engines, you need to provide the answers to the queries users are searching for.
The problem is that everyone at some point will reach a phenomenon known as "writer's block." If you are struggling for ideas on what to write about on your site then take a look at this list of content creation ideas.
1. Current Events - You can find current events and relate them to your site via a lot of different media. Look at Google News (search for keywords in your niche), Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, and Twitter.
2. Tutorials - Write a step-by-step guide on how to do something related to your market.
3. Make a List - Rankings based on popularity, quality, or whatever you can think of pertaining to your niche.
4. Analytics - Search through your site's analytics to find keywords that users are searching for that you may not have an answer for. If you provide the answer to a long tail search phrase it's easy to get ranked no. 1.
5. Questions - Find questions that consumers in your market are asking and write an article detailing the answer. Don't know what the questions are? Search through forums, Yahoo answers, or Wordtracker.
There you have 5 quick and easy content creation ideas so you can get past the writers block and start putting out content that people are interested in. You can use these ideas for your own site or when doing article marketing, either way it works great!
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Duplicate Content Penalties
People worry about duplicate content penalties in a lot of different situations. One of the more popular comes when it's done intentionally with article marketing, with how content management systems archive content, and when scrapers are stealing your content. Let's address each form in turn.
Article Marketing
If you post the same articles on several different directories, you are not going to get penalized and neither are they. What I have seen is that the more times your article gets posted around the web, the less value you see out of the incoming links from those articles. So if your article is distributed to 100 sites instead of only 10, it's not going to be 10 times as effective for you.
Think about this from Google's perspective, when a user enters a search query, do they want to list hundreds of the same articles? No, because if the user doesn't find what they are looking for in the first they want to move on to something different.
If you are using the same articles on your site as you do on others, simply putting a link back to the original article on your site will let Google know which article should appear in the index.
Your Own Site
You obviously don't want to intentionally create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with the same content. That is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines and could cause you to be penalized. There isn't an automatic filter or penalty though. If you read Google's definition of duplicate content they specifically say it is not grounds for action unless it appears to be deceptive or used to manipulate search results.
One problem I do see on sites is when they use really short articles. If your template is really big and you have a lot of links in your menus then a short article can appear to be more than 50% the same as other content on your site. Two ways you can help to make sure you don't run into this trouble. One, is to cut down on the size of your menus and the second is to make sure you use at least 250 words of original content in all of your articles.
Scrapers
I'll define scrapers as anyone who takes the content from your site without permission. Most of the time these sites violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines since they have little to no original content of their own.
Your site is not going to get penalized for having scrapers pick up your content. Again, think about it from Google's perspective. If a competitor is outranking me could I really get them banned by just creating 100 fake blogs and scrape all of their content? That wouldn't make sense.
The problem that you may run into is Google index's the scrapers version of your content instead of your own. However, the chances of that happening on an established site is pretty rare since the scrapers are normally pretty low quality. And Google recently launched a campaign to weaken the ranking of content farming sites.
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Write Quality Content
People today do not have long attention spans. When there are a lot of sites and media competing for their attention, you better make sure that you grab a hold of it quickly or else they will move on to something else. One way that you can do that is to write quality content that separates itself from the pack.
You don't have to write an article that is the most comprehensive guide to whatever it is you are talking about. You only have to stand out a little bit in order to add to the conversation in the market and separate yourself as an authority.
How to
The key to writing quality content is to understand your audience. You want to do two things, write about what they are interested in and also speak to them at their level. If you are writing a piece geared towards beginners, then you do not want to include technical terms and abbreviations that they might not understand.
If the article that you write is interesting and funny, it will have a broader appeal.
Benefits
To me, producing quality content is the best way to get links to your site. There are sites out there who buy a lot of paid links and have to keep re-upping over a certain time period or else they lose their rankings.
Cost
When you write quality content you have a small up-front cost (either what you pay an author or the time it takes you to write it yourself) and then you are done.
What's Low Quality
Do not write articles about you, your company or your products. People are not real interested in posting that on their site and it's not going to draw a lot of links. If you write something that is very technical it can not only be boring, but above most people's heads. That isn't going to draw you very many links either. If you focus on a very specific niche then there are not going to be a lot of people interested in the topic. Think in broad terms and general topics that have popular appeal.
Let me be clear, you can have some success with low quality, or as I like to call it "garbage" content. There are a lot of spam sites out there that are not ran by people, but are completely automated. If they find an article with the keyword they are targeting they re-post it on their site with a link back to yours (if you are lucky).
However, if you want to draw links for authoritative sites that are ran by real people and have accumulated trust with the search engines, you are going to have to write good stuff. Once the market starts recognizing you as a person who adds something to the topic you will find more people knocking on your door wanting you to write quality content on their sites. That's not going to happen if everything you post is regurgitated junk.
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Why Article Marketing?
If you are looking to get more traffic then you probably want to increase your rankings in the search engine. A great way to do that is with article marketing, but why does it work so well? Can it be effective across every niche or is a different tactic needed for your market? Is it considered black hat by the search engines?
Why It Works
Search engines want and need content. They don't provide any of it on their own so in order to provide answers to the queries that are posed to it by users, it needs to index and serve up content that others provide.
Search engines aren't the only ones relying on content to make their money. Publishers also want and need content. Content is how they show up in the search results to get traffic. It's also where they post their ads in order to make money off of their sites.
If you are able to drive traffic to the publishers site by giving them quality content that people link to, talk about in social media, and visit, you are going to be even more popular with them and the webmaster is going to want more content from you.
Why Do Article Marketing
The reason is that you want links. Not just any old link either, but a quality link that uses the anchor text you are targeting and that points to the landing page you want to rank for. You are doing the work to provide the content for another site and in exchange you want a link back to you.
You can also get traffic from the links. This traffic should be highly targeted because it clicks through a link from an article that you provided. While the traffic is nice, the real goal out of article marketing is to accumulate links with the anchor text you want to rank for.
If you get enough links to your site with the keywords that you want to rank for, eventually you will climb up the search engine results and get to No. 1. That is where the high volumes of traffic start coming in to your site.
The best part about article marketing is that it is as white-hat as you can get. This isn't toeing the line, approaching black hat status. Search engines aren't out trying to target article marketers to de-list them from their indexes. Quite the opposite in fact! They want and need the content to serve to their users so you are actually helping them out.
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Article Marketing Tips
Article marketing is an effective way to get links to your site with the anchor text that you want to rank for. Myself and many others have been using this technique for years to improve our SEO rankings and even though it's been abused by some, it's still a great way to build your site if done right. If you follow a few of the article marketing tips I've included below, you are going to be on the right track to increasing the returns on the effort you put in.
Get on Real Sites
A lot of beginners think article marketing is great because they found this list of 100 different places that take their content with a link back to their site. While there is definitely no harm in posting your content in a lot of different places, the real goal here is to get picked up by quality sites that are maintained and managed by real people. Sure, the articles you post with get picked up by automated sites and you'll get a few links out of that, but it will be of low quality. So, how do you do that?
Quality Content
Don't make the mistake of writing articles for the directories in the hopes of getting them ranked. You don't need to include keywords in the title nor do you need to stuff keywords into your content. What you want to do is write about topics that appeal to a wide range of people. The only time you have to worry about your keyword is with the anchor text of the link back to your site. That's it. Other than that write good stuff that people wouldn't be embarrassed to show real visitors.
Sexy Titles
I've already mentioned how you do not want to use keywords in the article title with the hopes of getting it ranked. If you want your article to get picked up by someone, make sure that you write a compelling title. Instead of "Golf Chipping Tips" you could try "3 Ways to Hole More Chip Shots".
Use Others
There are authors in the directories that are getting picked up by real sites. You don't have to wait around until you are one of them. Do Google searches of author names and article titles in your niche to see sites that are picking up that content. If you see a quality site, don't hesitate to contact them and show them a portfolio of your work. If other articles are getting a lot of action, you can probably write a spinoff that is even more interesting.
If you use these four article marketing tips, you are going to get higher quality links and more bang for your efforts by getting picked up by real sites than if you just post to the directories themselves.