Very interesting article by Erez Barak for searchenginewatch.com yesterday on the shift from old fashioned content to real-time website content. Today, the most important thing in many website content creators’ eyes is visibility. Competition on the search engines is fierce. Last year, the internet was home to an estimated 215 million websites and 152 million blogs – around half of these written by amateurs and hobbyists (source: Technorati).
Drowning in a sea of poor-quality, yet super-SEO posts is a very real risk. There is no point in crafting sublime copy if nobody is going to find it. Yet at Furlong PR, we are strong believers that the quality of your business blogs and other web content does not need to be compromised for the search engines.
Although aimed at traditional publishers, many of the tips Barak offered are equally useful to marketers – and will help in the contest for eyeballs.
1. Use real time data to stay ahead of the curve
Look both on your website (for example, traffic coming from a specific keyword search) and elsewhere (Twitter’s trending topics are ideal) to maximise the web’s role as barometer for news and happenings as they unfold.
2. Optimise your content for social as well as search
Your business bllg and other web content has to be incredibly easy to share. Use the most popular social sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, or YouTube if you’re using video content.
3. Use multimedia content
Following on from tip 2, remember that Yahoo, Google and Bing all show multi-format results on their first search engine results page (SERP). Think beyond text content and you’ll improve the chances of that content being found and shared.
4. Optimise your titles to drive shares
Your blog titles will be the first thing users see on social networks and search engines. Ensure that they are keyword-optimised, snappy and make use of sound bites to encourage comments and sharing.
5. Target the right search personas
Join the marketers who now create search personas to gain a deeper understanding of how their ideal online customers search online. Once you have built a clear and accurate search persona, tailor your content and style to match their needs and interests.
Tips adapted from searchenginewatch.com, click here for the original article.
Great tips Hayley! Do you think Title tags need to be as keyword rich or carry as much weight in the overall algorithm as they use to be?
Would you recommend any types of multimedia content specifically? I was under the impression it was a bad idea overall to use Flash because it weighs down the site, embeds important keywords that should be in the code of the website and now the issue of incompatibility with many phones and other tech devices that it can’t be seen on.