Introduction to Content Creation
Once you have done some keyword research and narrowed it down with competition research, you should hopefully still have a long list of viable keywords that you can target. In order to rank for them in the search engines you’re going to have to create some content that targets those keywords. This is the first of several posts that deal with the often overlooked subject of content creation.
Content is Mainly Text
Right now, when we think of content, we are still talking largely about text. Google is working on technologies that can allow it to find keywords in images, audio and video but these technologies are still in their infancy so for the time being, and probably for a while to come, content creation is mainly about writing text and making sure your keywords occur in that text.
Now I assume you know the basics of on-page SEO - you make sure your keyword is in your title and spread throughout the text of your article. There are other places you can put it such as tags and so on but there is much written about this already.
What To Write About
Everybody talks about SEO but what I rarely see discussed is the real ‘meat & potatoes’ - what the heck to write about in the first place! I often see advice about article marketing for instance. I saw something recently that said something along the lines of ‘write at least 10 articles a day, make sure you use your keywords prominently in all of them’. This is very easy advice to give but how easy is it to just bang out a ton of content, especially when you are specifically trying to target those articles towards particular keywords? I don’t know about you, but I find the actual article writing to be the most tedious and difficult part of building niche sites.
Article ‘Spinning’
This might be a good time to mention something called article spinning - this is a technique that uses a piece of software to take in an original article and then swap around various words and phrases in order to create multiple versions of the same source article. This is done to create multiple ‘unique’ articles from one very quickly in order to get around the duplicate content filter that Google has.
This technique is fine for submitting to article directories perhaps but it is not so effective for your own sites for a couple of reasons. Firstly the software rarely produces very well worded articles. They are okay for search engines but they will appear odd to a human. But here’s the real problem as I see it - if you are using multiple copies of what is essentially the same article then you lose out on the opportunity for additional long tail traffic.
Looking at my own traffic stats for my niche sites, so far as much as 99% of my traffic is not coming from the main keywords that I am targeting but from lots of other long tail phrases that has spawned from the content that I wrote. If every article was on exactly the same topic using the same words then I wouldn’t be getting that varied traffic.
To be effective, you really want each article that appears on your website to be different from the others. In the next few posts I’ll be talking about using content research, topic clusters, how to write lots of content for the same keyword, and what to do with your content once you’ve created it.
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Colin
October 13, 2008
Good point on the long tail traffic. I know someone who wrote a blog about hedge funds collapsing getting a lot of traffic from people who wanted to fix problems in their gardens.