It is a cliché in the SEO world that “content is king” – that to feed the hungry search engine beasts of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, you need to churn out targeted, keyword focused, and most of all useful content. This leads to the long-term passive pay-off that is the SEO pot of gold.
To succeed, you don’t want to get stuck fine tuning content and rewriting blog posts forever. You need to get stuff out the door so that you can get indexed, get ranked, and make a living.
So what’s the secret? How do you quickly create high quality content – stuff that’s really good and useful and that’s optimized for the search engines?
1. Get stuff out the door
Fritter away time fine-tuning your web pages, and you will eventually get discouraged, and your writing will also suffer. Do NOT be afraid to make mistakes. Build web pages, write your blog posts, tweet your tweets. Do whatever you need to do. But just get content produced. You will learn by doing.
2. Focus on keywords, but make it natural
Content needs to be first and foremost natural and good for readers. When you optimize and emphasize for keywords, keep each article focuses on one keyword or phrase, but you can also include variants on that. You spread your article too thin when you focus on 10 keywords.
3. Get input from coaches
Even if you majored in literature at an Ivy League College, you no doubt have a lot to learn about how to write for the web. The internet is a wild world with its own rules for what constitutes “good” or even “acceptable.” You can’t do it alone. You have to talk to people who’ve made a living at this business. Read about how SEO works and how the web writing community functions. Attend SEO and Internet marketing conferences, specifically go to sessions on copy writing and content.
4. Group your assignments
Instead of just doing 1 page for a topic at a time, try doing 10, 20, even 50 pages on the same topic. This may sound like a terrible chore to some people – who wants to write 50 pages in a row about long-term healthcare insurance, for instance? But if you are going for volume, then grouping helps. You can get into the spirit of the topic easily. You can also do research upfront and then have it all laid out in front of you when you write your pages. Take notes while you do research of different article ideas, and use keyword research as a tool to create pages for your topic.
5. Protect your hands
If you plan to bang out more than a few pages a day, you need to be aware of the ergonomic dangers of over-typing and keyboard misuse. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and repetitive stress injuries run rampant among web professionals. Take breaks, stretch, eat well, and maintain a good keyboarding set up. Listen to your body.
6. Develop and refine your system over time
You are not going to get it right the first time. You are not going to get it right the second time. Hopefully, a few days into the process of cranking out good SEO pages, you will begin to develop a rhythm. Get feedback from everyday people as well as SEO professionals to better develop your style, attitude, and routine. Keep reading. Keep building your skills. Focus on easily attainable short-term goals to string you forward.
7. Hire writers if you can’t do it yourself
If you don’t have the time to write your own content, consider hiring a content company like Applied Content, our content writing company. We have a team of very skilled writers that can do lots of high quality, unique content, very fast. If an hour of your time is worth more than the cost of an article, you should seriously consider assigning out your writing.
