Content Is Not King… but Focused Content Is At Least The Queen

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The never ending debate of which is more important, good content, or high quality links when you are trying to improve your search engine rankings may never come to an agreeable conclusion.

My personal belief is that high quality relevant links will always beat out good content and that has been my experience in optimizing hundreds of websites over the years.

The good news is we don’t have to choose one or the other. Instead lets get really good links, and write awesome content for our websites and dominate the search engines.

I want to talk a little about writing good content. There are a few things you need to keep in mind when adding content to your site.

Create SEO Focused Content
Writing content for the sake of writing content can be an incredible waste of time. When you are trying to increase your websites rankings, you should be targeting your key phrases in the content you add to your website.

Look for good long tail key phrases that you are not already ranking for. A whole page of content focused around one long tail key phrase can go a long way with the search engines.

For example, let’s say my website is in the internet marketing industry and I am targeting big key phrases like “internet marketing” and “internet business”. A long tail key phrase I could write about would be “internet marketing for lawyers”.

That would be the title of my page and then I would include that entire phrase in the content of the site a couple of times. I would then get 1-3 links for the phrase and sit back and watch as the rankings move up.

From an SEO standpoint this is a much better strategy than just rambling on for 500 words about nothing in particular.

Use Proper Grammar and Spelling
It is true that most people skim, they don’t read. Although I seem to have attracted a lot of readers. Keep your content free of punctuation and spelling errors. Those kinds of mistakes stand out like a soor thum.

Try not to use slang in your content unless it fits in with the style and feel of the website.

If you create good quality content that is focused on key phrases you want to rank for, you will find that your efforts will yield much better results.

#1 Way To Increase Traffic To Your Website

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One of the most common questions that our readers ask us is how to increase traffic to their website. To make this as simple as possible I would tell you that there are 2 things you should always be doing: Adding unique useful content and building your link popularity.

Adding Content – When I say you should add unique useful content to your site I really mean the content needs to be 100% original and useful to other people. Writing content just for content sake is a big waste of time, especially if you are the one writing all of the content. When you write useful content people will have a reason to come and read it. People will show it to other people, and people will link to it.

Let me give you a great example of how by writing one good post I increased the traffic to my website by 1000%. I came across a new product a couple of months ago and saw that the product was in my same industry so I looked at the site for a minute or two and then went on with my day. The next day I found a site that was almost exactly the same making the same claims and showing the same pictures of checks and sportscars.

I quickly realized that this new product was a scam. I decided to write an very in depth post about this scam and warning people what to look out for. Little did I realize that this scam was so widespread that thousands of people a month were searching for the name of this new product to find out if it was legit or not.

Because I took the time to write a very detailed post about the product we jumped to the top of the rankings for the product name. The result of this one post was going from a couple of thousand visitors a month to over 20,000 visitors a month. Imagine what your business could do with 10 times the amount of traffic it gets now.

Building Links – Because this is such a hard thing to do people will try to tell you that this is not that important in getting more traffic to your site. In reality, link building has proven to be the most influential factor in the rankings and traffic I have achieved with the internet. Nothing sways rankings more powerfully than good quality one way links that point to your website. (Read more about how to link build here) I achieved #1 rankings in Google with my old SEO website for the term “SEO services” when my site had much less content and far fewer pages than all of my competitors. How did I do it? A consistent flow of good links.

If you want to know my secret to success I just gave it to you. Good quality content and relevent quality links. If it sounds too simple then try it another more complicated way. All I can give you is what has helped me become successful online.

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Don’t forget to check out my guide to buying and selling websites online here.

If you follow this pattern exactly you will crack the Google code…

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People always ask me how often they should add content to their site to maximize their SEO efforts. So I don’t have to answer this question anymore I have decided to write the definitive answer that I can point anyone to in the future.

Let’s say you have 20 articles to add to your site. Here is the secret to SEO:

Add 1 article the first week and then 3 more articles spread out through the next week. Then the following week add 2 articles in one day and then add 1 article the next week. Then add 1 each day for 4 days and on day 5 take one off. Then the next week add 2. Replace the one you took off and then add 3 the next week. Then add 2 a week for 2 weeks. If you follow this pattern exactly you will crack the Google code.

The truth is I don’t know the answer. In fact I don’t think there is an answer. Do what makes sense for your website. If you have 500 articles that can be written and add new unique content to your genre then write the content and add it to your site. If you are adding nothing new to the content in your genre that is already out there then adding a ton won’t do much for you.

I have also been asked, once the articles are on the site how quickly should I point links to them.

As far as links go, it doesn’t matter when you add them, Google will find them when they find them and so you can add them now or in a week and they still might not find them for 3 weeks. Just add them.

The point is, don’t get too wrapped up in the details of SEO. Add good unique content to your site and get good quality relevant links to point to your content and you will do well in the search engines.

The One Essential Ingredient in Every Killer Headline

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Self interest.

You can be cutesy. You can be clever. You can be absolutely stupid and make the inane assumption that your audience will read the entire sales copy and then understand your cleverly written headline to “tie it all together”…

Or you can always write killer headlines by making sure your headline is full of self-interest. What’s in it for them?

Don’t stroke you own ego by showing everyone how smart you are. Tell your audience why they should care in the simplest words possible. My iPhone’s Scrabble game beats me with words like “aniseed” worth 85 points. But Mr. Scrabble Computer would be a horrible copywriter.

The headline is the gateway. It’s the attention-grabber. If you don’t grab their attention, then you’re phenomenally-written copy may as well be garbage. It won’t matter.

Here’s a simple copywriting formula for you:

Spend 70% of your time finding all of the pain points of your audience.
Spend 25% of your time writing a headline that addresses the most important pain point (or two).
Spend 5% of your time writing the rest of the copy.

Oh, and then once you think you’ve found the perfect headline, test it.

And keep on testing it.

And never stop testing it.