Best Practices for Content Marketing

Your content is king. Have you ever heard the phrase that content is king before? It’s because it’s true. The search engines love fresh and original content and so do visitors. If your content is bland or copied and pasted from another website, not only will your visitors be turned off of the site and click away, but the search engines will even rank you lower in the search results.

Be Original

The first and foremost thing you want to do is be original. You don’t want to copy and paste from any source because the search engines simply hate this. In Google you might even run the risk of being de-indexed if you don’t place original and fresh content. SEO for Google requires originality and doesn’t just start with writing content that’s never been published anywhere, but it starts with actually knowing what you talk about.

Be an Authority

Being an authority figure on the subject you’re writing about will make people want to know more. People will be more in tune to what you’re saying and want to click on your link if they feel like you’re an authority on a subject.

Here are some simple tips and steps to make sure you have a good grasp on your subject and that you appear as an authority:

1)      Tell everyone that you’re an authority. Even if you’re not, some people tend to be gullible when they’re desperate and looking for a solution to a problem. You might not know a single thing about a subject, but if you tell people that you in fact do know what you’re talking about and that you have been there, people will feel like you know what you’re doing.

2)      Show images and proof that you know what you’re talking about. For example, if you’re selling a product on making money from the internet, you’re going to want to show people testimonials and proof that your product works. You can include images of money you’ve made with the product or people talking about how much money they’ve made with the product.

Be Relevant

Remember, when submitting an article or a press release, you want to make sure you’re targeting a demographic that appeals to your product base. If you just randomly and blindly buy a bunch of traffic, it will only hurts your search engine rankings and does some public relations work for your company or website.

For example: If you’re submitting an article on how to clean your vehicle to a directory, you want to make sure the directory has a section for car maintenance or even cars. If you submit it to a cell phone forum or directory, you’re getting untargeted traffic which will result in a higher bounce rate.

What Not To Do

Don’t copy other people’s work and try to pass it off as your own. Doing this as discussed earlier only increases your bounce rate and disapproves you as an authority figure in your market. If anyone finds out you have duplicate content, they can report you to the appropriate place for Google and you might even be de-indexed.

Content marketing is a very powerful tool if it’s used correctly. Content drives traffic to your site and gives your website a backlink. However, the majority of people try to use content marketing as a spam method of obtaining backlinks and this always results very poorly and has consequences. If you continue to use spam and duplicate content to try to promote your website or service, you might end up de-indexed with no way of getting your site back onto the web or at least through Google.

Author Bio: Stuart McHenry is an Orange County SEO Consultant for McKremie.  You can connect with him on Twitter http://twitter.com/smindsrt.