Bernie | 
04 22nd, 2007| 
Some of our clients are small or medium size businesses. Most of the time their websites contain less than 50 pages of content and in some cases less than 30 pages. If you want to have a successful search engine optimization plan based on competitive keywords, you need a lot of content. How much? There is no black and white answer, and it really depends on how competitive your keywords are. You should consider many ways to write about the central theme of your company’s products or services.
It’s no secret that effective search engine optimization is based on content and inbound links. Search engines write about this by advising that you write content to satisfy your visitors. While we agree with this sentiment from a marketing perspective, the fact remains that your desirable keywords are very often competitive. So, to improve your search engine rankings you need to write more content, and produce more links.
When writing more content, consider these guidelines:
- Define the basis of your products/services. What is the reason your product/service exists?
- Describe the ways your products/services have been used by clients.
- Give specific examples of people or businesses using your products/services.
- What is the alternative to using your products/services?
- What are the pitfalls to avoid when using your products/services? This sounds negative but you can write it in such a way that your products/services allow people to avoid such pitfalls.
- What are common questions about your products/services?
- Post all your press releases. Press releases are legitimate content.
- Consider adding new sections to your website such as FAQs, Case Studies, Resources, Miscellaneous. These sections allow you to add new content regularly. If some of your content is written to entice search engines more than humans (no spamming though), you can bury the content in a section that doesn’t attract much traffic. Make sure this content has a lot of links to other pages in your website.
- Remember that search engines can actually determine if your website’s content is updated regularly. If you have not posted new content to your website in months, search engines can penalize your rankings for competitive keywords. Search engines generally want to reward websites with fresh content.
- For effective search engine marketing results, each page of content you write should be not less than 250 words and preferably about 400 words.
These are just a few ideas that should get your mind spinning with ways to write more content and the reasons for doing so.
