Beating Your Competition with Content
Time and again we've heard about the fact that “content is king”, but if it is indeed the king then with so many websites and blogs having great content, we can say that the Internet sure is littered with min-monarchies.
The steep competition in the Internet is such that we can no longer purely depend on good content to beat the competition. If you want to get a huge chunk of the market share via the Internet, you have to be realistic and use SEO to your advantage. However, relying too much on SEO is an even bigger mistake than relying on good content alone. These days, you have to do SEO, but you also need to have not just good content, but an excellent one to make it to the top.
If your website focuses on written content (i.e. blogs and news sites), the number one thing you can do to stay competitive is to make sure you don't get left behind. Whatever industry or theme your blog or new site might specialise on, make sure that you have content that is always up-to-date. Write as often as possible to cover new stories as they come out. As much as possible, beat your competitors in publishing breaking stories so that you get a good lead when people search for the story in News Search. To be able to do this, you should subscribe to your competition and other related new sites, so that you will be aware of each story as it emerges. If you are not in front of your computer all the time, make sure you set up alerts using your mobile phone, so that you can at least find someone to write and fill in for you wherever you are, and whatever you may be doing. Obviously this strategy will take up much of your time, but it will pay off in the end.
In your enthusiasm to have an updated blog or news site, make sure that you don't sacrifice the quality of the content. If there's nothing new and/or interesting to write about, then don't post any thing. The Internet is so full of noise as it is, and the last thing you want is for your visitors to feel like your site is just another site adding to the barrage of noise. Post content that are only truly relevant to you site's theme, and if you do decide to put up a relatively unrelated topic once in a while to get a feel of your regular visitor's reaction, make sure that you at least seque into the topic really well to increase positive acceptance.
And last but not least, don't forget to incorporate some keywords and phrases in your content. Sure, your aiming to please your visitors, but you can't ever neglect the SEO side of things. Just mention the main keyword a couple of times, and pepper the rest of the content with variants of the keyword and related terms. Remember, you shouldn't be optimising just for the primary keyword, but also for the long tail.
Vic Carrara
Masterwebsoftware.com
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