3 Keys for Creating ‘Rich’ Content

When it comes to marketing your business, it’s not as simple as creating a website, putting it on the Internet and waiting for the customers to roll in.

As of June 2011, there were 346,004,403 websites on the Internet. If that’s not competitive, I don’t know what is.

The problem is, when you type a word into Google Search, it will probably find a few million results, but only about ten will be selected for the first page. And while your website is most likely within those millions of results somewhere, if it’s not on one of the first few pages, it might as well not be in there at all!

So as we mentioned in our previous post, one of the best ways to boost your search engine ranking is to include “rich” content on your website. Here are three key techniques:

1. Include useful resources - Your website should be more than a list of services and your contact details. This one depends a lot on your business type and communication style, but the aim is to get people to bookmark your website or refer to it for useful or interesting information. You can do this by including articles, news or blog posts on your website. Even better, leave room for reader comments so people can interact with you and each other, to create a “buzz”.

2. Make it keyword rich - There are simple tools available such as Google Keyword Search, which you can use to find the most commonly searched words of relevance to your business. By including those keywords throughout your website, as well as in meta tags and meta keywords, you may very well boost your search rankings and help customers to find your website.

3. Keep it fresh - This is about discipline. In the constantly changing world of the Internet, your website will quickly become outdated. Make sure you regularly check and update your website; this can be industry news, FAQs, blog posts, articles, or anything else your customer may find interesting. Keeping your content fresh will keep people coming back to your website.

So that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to rich content and SEO, but it’s a great start. Another useful technique is link building, but we’ll focus on that in our next post.