SEO, web content strategies, blogging and link buidling

How do I optimise my...? How often should I update my...?

After discussion after discussion with a range of Wiliam’s clients in a wide range of industries, I have been asked my fair share of questions about search engine optimisation, content for the web, content generally, copywriting and link building.

If you are familiar with these concepts and understand their interrelationships, getting a website moving is not longer an art and is rendered far more methodical. Albeit far less romantic, this can have huge benefits to those companies which take the time to understand the concepts.

However, frustrating as it may be for most of our clients before they come to Wiliam, so few people in this industry, let alone generally, have any idea about how to use content, link building, SEO and targeted copywriting strategies together to take their website and subsequently their company to the next level online.

Without intending to replace the need to need to work with an experienced firm in this process, I hope some of the information below gives a good introduction to what is required to get your websites ranking higher in Google and your brand out there.

Regular relevant content and blogging

Most of this advice relates to a corporate blogging strategy but the advice applies similarly to any web content that is regularly updated such as articles, news and publications.

On the face of it, it is great to provide relevant and interesting content on a regular basis to your customers as it creates the possibility that you may become a ‘thought leader’ in your market which is typically a great position to be in.

However, and in all brutal honesty, from a search optimisation perspective, we are really only interested in one thing; and unfortunately for our sensibilities it is not thought leadership...

Backlinks

That thing is Backlinks which I shall simply define as links from other websites to your website.

Ultimately, anything that can be done to increase backlinks to your website (especially sub-pages of your website like blogs) is our goal.
Thus, creating backlinks is what blogging and producing web content is all about and where link building and trend based content strategies have been derived from.

Without going too far in detail into the question of why, the Google Pagerank algorithm places a good part of the relevance of a website on the number of websites it has linking to it (or backlinks).

Put simply, if you want to rank higher in search engines, you are going to want to think about backlinks. In order to generate backlinks, unless you are already the Sydney Morning Herald, you are going need a good regular and relevant content strategy such as blogging to give people a reason to link to you.

The summarised ‘how to’

There are many ways to generate backlinks but for the majority of corporations, it can probably be simplified to any combination of the following:

1. Write up to date and relevant content that people want to link to (it helps if this content is original but it is not necessary as long as it isn’t blatant plagiarism)

2. Optimise the pages that the blogs or articles are posted on for the Google and the web generally (e.g., not PDFs, optimised and appealing headings and page titles, short and to the point writing, opinioned content where possible)

3. Submit your blogs and / or articles to multiple social networking websites, RSS depositories, blog directories and search engines.

4. Commit to a regular interval of time to post the blogs / articles and keep to it. I personally recommend between a minimum of once a fortnight to a maximum of 2 to 3 a week depending on the clients’ needs with 1 a week a good middle ground.

All of the above will really get your website traffic moving but you can also go one step further and target the content you produce (including the keywords within it and the concepts) to what is being searched in Google. This is done by using tools that are available online to illustrate trends in particular search terms and which give data on the number of searches for a particular phrase each day.

You will probably need to work with an experienced SEO firm such as Wiliam to achieve the SEO page optimisation required and to get help with the link submissions but ultimately an understanding of the above will provide you with one of the most powerful marketing strategies on the internet.