Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Useful and Unique Content

Com­pleted So Far:

I now have a list of pow­er­ful key­words that I will be effec­tively scat­ter­ing through my web­site. How­ever, as effec­tive as key­words are, every suc­cess­ful blog/website needs qual­ity con­tent. Two char­ac­ter­is­tics of qual­ity con­tent is that the con­tent is both use­ful and unique. So, the next task is to start devel­op­ing some use­ful and unique con­tent.
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New Devel­op­ments:

Regard­less of what other search engine opti­miza­tion tech­niques you use,  hav­ing qual­ity con­tent on  your blog is an absolute ‘must have’.

Although qual­ity con­tent gen­er­ally con­sists of con­tent that is well writ­ten (with cor­rect spelling and gram­mar), it is, in fact, much more than that. Think of the web­sites and blogs that you reg­u­larly visit. Why do you keep going back to those sites? Usu­ally vis­i­tors keep return­ing to sites, or sign up for sub­scrip­tions to the site’s email newslet­ter or RSS feed, because they find the infor­ma­tion on the site use­ful to them, in one way or another. For exam­ple, the site enter­tains them, or it solves a prob­lem they have, or it helps them learn how to do some­thing, etc.

The other fac­tor that most, if not all, suc­cess­ful sites have is that they are unique — the per­son­al­ity of the author shines through. So, if you have a nat­ural laid-back atti­tude, let it come through in your site’s con­tent, but if you don’t, then don’t force it. If you have a great sense of humor, let the con­tent of your site reflect that, but, again, if you don’t then don’t force it. Write your con­tent in the style that reflects how you would nat­u­rally hold a conversation.

Below are 10 tips that can help you cre­ate use­ful and unique content:

1. use your own ‘voice’ — make your blog unique by let­ting your per­son­al­ity through, don’t try to copy some­one else’s blog
2. know your audi­ence — know what their interest’s are, what prob­lems they are try­ing to solve, what they are try­ing to learn more about, etc.
3. be enter­tain­ing — peo­ple won’t read dry, aca­d­e­mic materials
4. be edu­ca­tional — cre­ate how-to arti­cles and posts
5. be infor­ma­tive — pro­vide use­ful infor­ma­tion on a topic
6. be prac­tical — pro­vide inter­views, case stud­ies, and profiles
7. pro­vide break­ing news — keep peo­ple up-to-date with what’s going on in your area of expertise
8. cre­ate a sense of com­mu­nity — ask ques­tions, solicit feed­back, gen­er­ate comments
9. be inspi­ra­tional
10. be con­tro­ver­sial

When you cre­ate qual­ity con­tent, a great idea is to use both your posts and your pages in tan­dem to gen­er­ate the kind of con­tent that keeps peo­ple com­ing back to your site, not just read­ing your posts on from their email. This is par­tic­u­larly use­ful if you have affil­i­ate con­nec­tions on your site, or are sell­ing your own e-books or infor­ma­tion pack­ages from your site.

One way of doing this is to cre­ate posts that are rel­a­tively short, between 250 and 500 words or so. These posts could con­tain, for exam­ple, a brief intro­duc­tion to an idea or a topic that is more fully dis­cussed in an arti­cle that you have pub­lished on one of your site’s pages. You could then link the post to the arti­cle on one of your site’s page. (Search engine bots and spi­ders like inter­nal links — more on this in a later post.) The arti­cle could be either a sta­tic page, or a Word doc­u­ment or .pdf file that you have pub­lished on a page. This way, too, the sta­tic pages remain ‘ever­green’ - they are eas­ily avail­able as stand alone con­tent that keeps read­ers com­ing back to your site to read, while the dynamic posts can be more top­i­cal or con­tro­ver­sial in nature.

If you are inter­ested in explor­ing the type of con­tent that can be found on very suc­cess­ful sites, then check out the Tech­no­rati web­site at: http://www.technorati.com, for a list of the Top 100 blogs (based on pop­u­lar­ity). Inter­est­ing that most of these blogs are infor­ma­tive, use­ful and unique blogs.
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Next Step:

The struc­ture and for­mat used when writ­ing for the Web is quite dif­fer­ent than the struc­ture and for­mat used when writ­ing for other media. The next post, to be pub­lished on Mon­day, will list some of these unique struc­ture and for­mat­ting fea­tures that writ­ing for blogs and web­sites require.

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If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Opti­miz­ing Your Blog from the begin­ning by going to the Intro­duc­tion post.