How generating great content can transform your SEO, improving your internet marketing and increasing your brand visibility to help you sell more stuff!

One of the things that really affect your SEO is the content on your website. It needs to be informative, useful and regularly updated to achieve the most SEO benefit.

So, you may be sat there thinking ‘but I don’t have time to create new content for my website everyday!’ and very true, you probably don’t. So, where does this magic content come from? Well, here’s the genius part. You have several options, a decent SEO Company (like Creare) will regularly create articles written on your behalf to update your site with. At Creare we’re quite strict about the article titles and content: it must reflect the keywords our customers pay for. The content has to reflect our customers’ businesses and we always create links going back to the relevant pages within the site we are optimising. So, that’s one option, but I did mention there were several options available to you, so here’s the rest…

Get your employees to write blog posts on a regular basis. This is what we do here at Creare, I’m writing this post because it’s an integral part of my job. It has a use in that I have to write about something that regular readers will find interesting and informative, as well as being beneficial for our own SEO efforts.

By getting your employees involved, you not only increase your content with information that is useful to your customers, but empower your employees as well. OK, a lot of them may not feel confident with their writing skills, but the more you do something, the better you get at it! Another thing to consider is that you probably don’t know how much your employees know about what it is you do, you will probably find yourself pleasantly surprised at their knowledge.

By spreading the workload, you will find it all gets done, by professional people who will start to feel real pride in their achievements. Don’t forget to distribute your articles and blog posts through Social Media Networks for an even bigger boost to your efforts.

Even if you do employ an SEO Company like Creare who regularly write articles on your behalf, you should still consider getting your employees involved. It’s such a beneficial exercise – you’d be crazy no to do it!

It is important if you plan to implement, or already have a Search Engine Optimisation campaign that you understand how the search engines work. I’m not telling you to hire a mathematician to try and figure out algorithms – that’d be a bit of a waste of time as the algorithms change so frequently. But there are some basic facts that I think, even if you know them already,I still think its important to revisit and think about.

The search engines have some crucial operations that let them provide useful and relevant web results when their users try to find information, services or products by using their search engine.

Crawling the World Wide Web

Search engines run automated programs, called ‘robots’ (sometimes shortened to ‘bots’) or ‘spiders’ that use hyperlinks to ‘crawl’ the pages and documents that make up the web. It is impossible to work out exactly how many web pages there are but it’s somewhere around 20 billion according to some estimates, search engines have probably crawled just under half of these.

Indexing pages and documents

Once a page has been crawled the content it displays can then be “indexed”. Indexing is basically a giant database that stores all the documents that make up the search engine’s ‘index’. This index must be managed so that the search engine can search and sort through billions of documents in fractions of a second.

Processing Queries

When a user types a search query into the search engine, the search engine can retrieve this information from it’s index all the documents that match that query. The search engines determine the match by checking if the terms or phrases used for the query are in the document. This is why keywords are important, and the placement of keywords is even more important.

Ranking the Results

After the search engine has found which results are a match for the query, the search engine’s algorithm runs calculations on each result to find the most relevant for the query. The most relevant web page will be placed at the top, and it will run down from there. This way, users can choose the site they want to visit first.

Needless to say, this all happens in no time at all – type a search query and the search engine will come back with the results almost instantly. That’s pretty impressive, in my opinion!

The most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo! And MSN) have some of the most complex systems for finding results. Their algorithms are closely guarded secrets, that constantly change and get developed.

By taking this information and using it to your advantage, you can see that the most important thing is to get your content right. This is what the search engines’ ‘read’ in order to index your site and then use to determine your search placement. By using the keywords that your target audience would use to find your services you can gain the types of traffic required to convert users into buyers. You may want to read Content Creation for seo purposes to get some useful starting points for writing your copy.