Content Writing is one of the factors that influence SEO. Gone are the days when keyword repetition 8-10 times in a 400-500 word page was important. Of course the keyword should be present in the content, but the gravity is still a debatable topic. And further if your content is garbage (will discuss later) whatever be the number of repetitions – your page may not rank well.

Why is SEO to some extend dependent on Content Writing?

When someone searches for information online what they do? They type a few words describing what they are looking for in the search engines. The search engines then look for “matching content” in their database of websites and return the ones with the matching content. So from SEO point of view content is important.

How important?

Well let me state an example first. Let’s suppose someone is looking for “freelance content writer”. Lets compare these two type of pages that has these keywords present in their content on “freelance content writer”.

Page 1: Has this type of content:

We have the best freelance content writer. We have the cheapest freelance content writers and our freelance content writers are one of the best.

Page 2: Has this type of content:

Are you looking for freelance content writers? With more than 900 pages of content written till date I think I am the one who can fit your needs:

Here are some examples of freelance content writing done by me:
Example 1, Example 2, Example 3…..

My rates are quite affordable too…. etc.

Now, which page do you think the search engines will prefer listing in the first page? You guessed it right Page 2.

Why? Needless to say because its content is informative, complete and offers some value to its visitors. Page 1 content is nothing but garbage.

(Please keep in mind content is one of the many factors involved in ranking.)

What should you do to make sure your website’s content offers value to your visitors:

1. Do not write on a topic you don’t have much knowledge on.

2. If it doesn’t interest you, then don’t write on it.

3. Write something that you are very comfortable in.

4. Write in a language that even a 5th grade student understands.

5. Try not to have any grammatical errors / spelling mistakes in your copy. Though I agree, 100% accuracy cannot be achieved – but you should try to make it as correct as possible.

6. Overall feeling of the content should be nice, informative and beautiful.

Believe me content writing can be fun and rewarding too – but writing for the sake of writing and for top ranks may be a waste of time.

If you want me to write content for your website please contact me with details.

What do you say?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is optimizing a website in such a way that it gets top ranks in the search results for certain terms (keywords) in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.

Why is SEO Important?

It’s important because it helps you to get more visitors – and unlike PPC, one need not pay for every click. Needless to say – more the visitors mean more the sales. Of course there are many other factors such as landing page, targeted traffic etc that come into play before a sale or a lead takes place, but it’s a safe bet to assume that more visitors means more sales.

But that’s one side of the coin. Is SEO easy? NO!!! Can SEO be done overnight NO!!!

SEO takes time to build:

It is not like Rome was built in a day. Good things take time. So is SEO. If you have optimized your website and think that you will have users/buyers from the next day then you are very wrong. It takes time to get top ranks. Even if you have optimized your site well, got some great inbound links, have great content and have dome some on-page optimization stuff – still it might take some time before your site gets top ranks.

Why?

One reason can be that Google needs to update its database before new results can be thrown. This takes some time, anywhere from 2 weeks to about a month or more.

One should also note that Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes that the internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives. In February, 2009 while speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus as part of their annual industry conference he said that the brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted. He also added that Brands are the solution, not the problem. And most importantly, “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

It looks like Google has started giving more emphasize on the Brands. So sites that Google think is a brand might get ranked faster than a normal site.

SEO Content:

SEO content also takes time to build. One cannot just write whatever one wishes to. SEO content has to be well researched and then has to be implemented well. This too takes time. And it takes much more time by the search engines to read those SEO contents and then put them into their databases and then implement them into their search results.

Note that content must be added over time. Adding tons and tons of content in one single day might get your site in trouble.

Does SEO Stops at Ranking?

NO, SEO doesn’t just stop at rankings. It’s lot more than that. For starters every part of your site matters including the design. There are many ways to bring in visitors to your site – social networking, PPC, direct online advertising etc. That said SEO is the best way to boost up traffic.

Also SEO makes for a credible source. Advertising is not always considered to be true or reliable because it is paid. But in case of search engine listings, it differs. People have an inherent belief in search engine listings. They seldom notice the SEO techniques that work behind to bring in visitors. They have more faith in the organic search engine listings than in online advertisements.

Also SEO is just one time investment. You don’t have to pay anyone when someone visits your site. That’s because the person is visiting the site directly from a search engine. Thus it’s better to invest time in making a good search engine optimized website. This will help in the long run. 

Do you think SEO takes time and is it worth it?

Websites are generally present because people have put them out for a particular objective. In some cases, people are interested in putting out their views to the general public through web logs that are commonly known as blogs. A lot of celebrities and media personalities like to interact with their fans and propagate their ideas through websites. This is also true of many professionals as well as religious leaders who want their views as well as sermons to reach the largest audience possible in order to spread their views far and wide. The objective of a website is to garner the maximum number of eyeballs in the best interests of the website. There are other sites also that are geared towards e-commerce or online marketing. These websites have been created with the express idea of providing means to advertise goods and services that can be used by the public to make orders and buy online. These online marketing sites generally have online forms in order to enable people to make online purchases and increase their revenue. A good example of this is companies like www.amazon.com or www.traverus.com in the realms of online sales.

However one needs to keep in mind that just having a website is not enough. Whatever be your goal – brand building, information distribution, advertising, lead generation, sales or service – a website needs visitors. Without visitors a website is a waste resource.

If you are a big brand like Google, Yahoo, CNN etc people may type your URL in the web browser and reach your site, else you may need to advertise your site.

There are two major ways to get visitors – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). Both these methods involve money and time.

The way most sites reach out to a wider audience is by way of search engine optimization (SEO), which essentially refers to the effective use of keywords. A majority of web surfers get to websites through search engines like Google.com as well as Yahoo.com. These sites crawl up or look at various websites that have the particular keywords, which the surfer has used to search for information online. These sites have certain complex algorithms or Meta search formulae that are used to assign specific ranks to the websites based on the usage of the keywords. For instance, if you look up the terms “Indian curry recipes”, you will find a listing of various sites that have these keywords. The reason of such a result is search engine optimization that helps sites get better ranked on basis of how well certain key words or phrases have been used in their web pages.

It is said that websites ranked 1-10 or at most between 1-20 have a much better chance of attracting traffic, which is why SEO is indeed such a great business as well as training proposition. SEO experts are indeed in great demand as they can influence immensely the way a website is ranked and thus the amount of traffic that a site is able to garner online. It is indeed no wonder that there are so many sites and online groups that are quite dedicated to ensuring better SEO knowledge and information dissemination to SEO enthusiasts and students.

SEO is an exciting field of work and study in today’s context. A lot of researchers are working day and night to come up with new strategies to enhance SEO effectiveness. There are whole new companies that have mushroomed with the express objective to provide SEO related services online. If you are looking to outsource SEO services you must be very careful before doing business without knowing about the history of any SEO company. Google has also written some questions you need to ask before hiring an SEO. I quote:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?
• How do you measure your success?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• What’s your experience in my country/city?
• What’s your experience developing international sites?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been in business?
• How can I expect to communicate with you?
• Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

Good SEO experts critically look at online content and revise it based on keyword research as well as HTML editing with a view to enhancing search rankings. While no one can guarantee that their services will surely give you a number one ranking, it is true that an optimized site will have a better ranking than the one which has not been search engine optimized.

The concept of pay per click (PPC) is also linked to the objective of increasing traffic to a website. In very simple terms, pay per click means that an online marketing company would pay to the website a particular amount based on the traffic that the site brings to the site of the marketer. For instance, if you have a tie-up with Yahoo.com and have agreed to pay them $0.10 per visitor that you get on your site through yahoo, you would have to pay up $1.00 for 10 clicks ($0.10 * 10 = $1).

Pay per click can also have various levels and different kinds of arrangements with various sites based on the kind and volume of traffic that you get from the site that is more visible and well known. You could also differentiate between sites by paying more for sites that bring greater effectiveness into the traffic on your site as compared to less effective ones. PPC is a very effective and quite commonly used means of getting targeted traffic.

While SEO does show results, you can rest assured that targeted PPC is much more effective in attracting web traffic. When you go about further incentivizing your customers to view your website, you will find an exponential increase in the web traffic and that too so fast that it will belie your wildest expectations. No wonder the whole world is going absolutely gaga over PPC and its results. The moot point here is that both in SEO as well in PPC, one cannot underestimate the utility of keyword research in driving traffic. The only difference is that with PPC, one cannot depend on two word keywords. You will need a set of long word keywords that are not being searched up by competitors so that your position is unparalleled and unmatched as compared to what the competition is up to.

PPC keyword research is quite an exact science. You have to know a lot about which words to pair and which to eliminate in order to achieve the most optimized and suitable results. Of course there are many tools available to help you do keyword research. Apart from the tool, a lot of this also happens with time and through trial and error, meaning that the results cannot be quick fix or ‘in-a-jiffy’ answers. One also has to be an accomplished PPC keyword research expert and not just an SEO expert in order to bring about the very best results. For instance, if you have a client who is selling various computer products including accessories, peripherals as well as software products, it would not be possible to actually run a PPC on each and every one of the computer products as that would be too wide a net leading to diffused results. The PPC keyword expert would do the keyword tests by using the word computer in conjunction with various other words like accessories, peripherals or software in order to achieve the best results and thus eliminate those combinations that are sub-optimal. So, there lies the essence of researching PPC for SEO purposes.

One interesting fact is that SEO is more popular than PPC. One of the major reasons why I think SEO is more popular than PPC is that the human nature of thinking that free is good and better. I do agree through SEO one can get free visitors, but it may take a long time before someone sees results. Compare this to PPC – it can bring instant traffic, though you may have to pay for every visitor irrespective of whether there is a sale or not. In the long run may be SEO is profitable, but it can be debated whether each and every site can generate that much traffic required to stay in business through SEO only.

Website owners who realize this therefore “try” both SEO and PPC to generate traffic and track results to invest more time, money and energy where the returns are the most.

Its debatable whether SEO is better or PPC. If you ask me I would suggest first try PPC. Get to know the keywords that can bring good returns for your site and then concentrate on only those keywords for SEO purposes.

Recommended Reading:

1. SEO vs PPC Whitepaper

2. SEO vs PPC – Cases

What do you say? SEO or PPC?

A successful SEO campaign has many factors that make it effective. You will need a website that is search engine friendly, has well written content, several back links from quality sites and an aged domain that spells “authority”. However, if you have taken care of all these aspects and not spared a single moment on the keywords that you should use, your effort will not serve its purpose. If you are unaware of how important keywords are, what keywords to target, don’t know how much competition is there while you try to get traffic/page rank via these keywords, you will not be able to grow your online business.

So, first things first – keywords are those phrases or bunch of words that web surfers use to find something online. Unless you list and use words that the web surfers are likely to use as their search term to find your products/services, you will not get visitors to your site and will be lost among the numerous other sites on the Internet.

There are various online tools that will help you to find the appropriate keywords for your niche. Some renowned tools used by several webmasters are:

Google Keyword Tool – A free to use tool that shows you the advertiser competition, search volume, estimated ad position and estimated average CPC for the particular search term.

Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – A free tool offered at Aaron Walls’ site that’s powered by Wordtracker. This tool shows daily search volumes, links these search volumes to related results from global search, offers links to Google AdWords price estimate tool, provides links to keyword research results from Google Trends, Yahoo! Suggest, Google Suggest, Keyword Discovery and Google Synonyms. There is much more information in addition to the above mentioned ones that this tool offers.

Trellian Keyword Discovery – This powerful tool brings together the keyword search statistics from more than 180 search engines over the world. It can help you find search phrases that web surfers use to come across products and services. You can also do keyword density analysis and know what search terms are bringing hits to your competitors’ sites. 

Wordtracker – Though it has the option of a free trial, you will need to pay a fairly reasonable subscription fee to use this tool for the optimum results. The subscription to Wordtracker will enable you to list the most popular and relevant keywords so that you can optimize the content of your website and improve your search campaigns (both PPC and organic). This tool will also help you to explore online markets, find opportunities in your niche and utilize them.

SEMRush.com – This paid tool will help you to conduct keyword research and have data required for advanced SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign.

KwBrowse – This tool helps you to find relevant keywords for a particular search term. It also shows an alphabetical keyword list and links to some companies that are relevant to the search term.

NicheBOT – This keyword research service uses several keyword sources such as Keyword Discovery, Google and Wordtracker to give the most comprehensive result. You will get access to more than 295 billion keywords that spans 243 countries and is made available in 41 languages.

Keyword Elite – This paid keyword research software will help you to research keywords that are widely searched but don’t have much competition.

Which keyword tool do you use?