Quality written content is one of the keys to getting more of your website crawled and indexed by search engines and then being seen as an authority in your market. Quality content is important; as is enough of it to be effective. 300-500 words is ideal (We’ve tested and usefully longer -is- better. It ranks higher and gets more traffic)

Also very important is more relevant topics creating more pages. Websites need content and lots of it!

Most small business websites are 6 pages with very little written content. Sites like these, especially if they are up against bigger, more developed competitors (and this is increasingly the case), are impossible to get high rankings for a wide variety of keyword searches. There just isn’t enough material!

Our small to medium sized business clients are busy people. So how can we simplify the process and make it as easy as possible to get more effective content produced that will help their business? Below is a process that we use internally that helps our clients take care of this. My thanks to Alex Mandossian who has been talking about this for a long while!

There are a lot of advantages to using a system like this. It requires a low time commitment for you (or our client), you talk quicker than you write, it can produce a lot of content when you get on a roll, and it’s quality content that is keyword rich – resulting in more traffic!

Step 1 — It always starts with keyword research

In Google: start typing questions. (For now Bing doesn’t work as well for this.) You have a local garage or you’re a dentist… Go to Google and begin searching for “(ford) air conditioning problems” or “what is cosmetic dentistry” etc. – Don’t Hit Enter! – check out the suggestions that are generated. Note these (use a screen capture tool) and now you’ve got some starting topics.

What makes this tactic effective is that right away you know you are writing about what people are actually searching for. There is no point in writing on topics where there is no interest, right?

Other free keyword tools to use to get ideas from:
Wordtracker Keyword Questions
Type in a topic and this will return the most asked questions… the challenge is that it returns a fair amount of junk, so it does take time to edit this to a useable list.

Suggester
Type in a term and it suggests other related search terms. Use these as idea starters.

The search engines have other tools (look on the left side): for instance the Google Wonder Wheel will give you related searches in a graphical format; or the Timeline will show you which time frame searches are being conducted for -i.e. There are many searches for “ford air conditioning problems” centred around 1975.

Step 2 — Easy Content Production

The two main ways to produce this content are: a. Hire a copywriter to produce an article; b. Get a subject matter expert to produce it.

In most cases, the expert version is far more effective and valuable. The hangup is that they (you) don’t have the time (or habit skills) to produce written content.

Here’s the secret of getting the content produced:

Option 1: If you are a good speaker, record answers to the questions. We send our clients the questions and they record answers and send the audio back. Very easy to do with a smartphone!

Option 2: If prompting works better (…and ensures it gets done!) use a Google Voice or Skype account; the key is to be able to record calls. Get someone to call and ask you the questions. In our case, at an arranged time, the client calls the Google Voice number and are asked questions from the research in step 1. Recorded calls are downloaded.

For extra points of usefulness, create a format ahead of time. Have a defined process and stick to it.

Step 3 – Transcription and Repurposing

Email the recordings to a third party to transcribe. Using a quality transcription service will save a lot of editing time.

However, here is where preparation makes a difference and having a set format pays off.

If the call produces a good sounding interview, you can repurpose this in a number of ways; as audio, as a podcast and/or as the sound track for slide show videos. That content in all forms can go on your website or blog as well as be distributed online, getting high value links and traffic from podcast directories (list of many podcast directories), video distribution sites, content sites (like www.scribd.com; www.docstoc.com; issu.com; slideshare.net; authorstream.com; etc.), and with some massage (like creating an excerpt and shortlink) on social media like Facebook and Twitter.

One of these a week will create thousands of high value links a year to your website! Produce enough content to get 3 posts a week or more and you get hundreds of thousands of links each year. This is how to be dominant in your niche.

To save time, get the transcription formatted as a post for a blog with headlines and bullets – make it easy to read and people will read it. This probably will require a 2 step process; someone to transcribe (cheaper), and someone to format.

There is plenty of information on formatting for readability, here’s one of my favorites…
How to format a blog post by Problogdesign

The advantage of this system is that you have most of the work done in minimum time on your (or our clients) part.

But is content -all- you need?

The structure of that content and where the clues are left as to the relevance and meaning of the content is also just as important; that is what a good seo team helps with. Add in proper and ongoing keyword research both from online databases and from proper tracking of visits to your website through what people are using to find your business, and then optimizing based on that data makes for large increases in website traffic.

Search is a rapidly changing marketing area that with the ongoing slow demise of YellowPages both on and offline, has become much more important for businesses.

Search engines use algorithms that are continuously updated, refined and added to. As an example, Google alone now has multiple search engines for images, video, blogs, shopping, books, news, mobile and more. All of these prefer structured data with a taxonomy that Google has indicated they support… Search engines also gather data and fit it into a taxonomy in order to parse, organize and rank it. That is how they find your content and sometimes rank you well for some terms.

This SE preference for structured data is clearly shown in the use of KML (keyhole markup language) in Google Maps, Google Mobile and Google Places searches, where providing this markup on the appropriate page on your site and in Search Engines Webmaster Tools accounts increases find-ability on all devices (computers, mobile phones, tablets) as well as increases your ability to rank higher and stay there. The search engines highly recommend that and the use of other taxonomy like hCard, hReview, etc., – it’s not just me spouting off.

Google makes a lot of changes to search to improve it. In 2009 they made over 500. They have a corporate mandate to make one major improvement to search -every- day. In 2010, the additions of the Caffeine update where site speed, clean html and RDFa structured data were increased as ranking factors followed by the introduction of instant search, the addition of social media results and rich snippets of structured data into search, and then the integration of local search results into natural search results in Oct. were the biggest and most drastic, influential changes they have made in 10 years.

Your ranking could be reaping the benefit of that last change of integrating local search and natural search for some keywords, if you’ve claimed your Google Places page, filled it out and gotten reviews. Great Job! There are further steps that could be taken to cement your position against optimization by competitors. An example — citation links – 30 – 60 are best for stable high ranking in our experience so far. There are many more things to do to optimize your local listing.

Keeping up to these massive changes made by the search engines is what a real search engine optimizer stays on top of. Then we take that information, test it, and then provide accurate actions both on and off page for customers which results in their websites ranking higher. We’ve never failed to increase ranking and increase traffic significantly.

The basics of our business are relatively simple – good keyword research, leading to proper on-page optimization for those keywords both in the code (html, structured data like kml, hReview, hCard, etc) and in the content, proper focusing of site page rank flow through the site’s structure, and off-page high value link building. The devil is in the details of doing the work and tracking the results.

Doing these steps allows both search engines and searchers to easily find the information they want. That leads to higher ranking for more keywords and more business.

If you’ve started on seo and local seo for your website, what you’ve done is good! The danger of thinking that it’s enough is that it assumes that the competition is standing still. We are in the midst of an internet boom that makes 1999 look like a minor pimple — for a myriad of reasons. Social networks, online video, mobile device growth and the easy spread of information is enabling this while traditional media like YP, radio, newspapers and TV are all less effective advertising media, with less users and struggles to stay profitable.

A businesses internet presence is a critical component of attracting customers now. It’s only going to become more competitive. We can help.

Part 2 – Planning With Naming in Mind

Nomenclature – A site URI web address that looks like www.your site.com/?=zlsi43yrsbc is missing a large search engine signal as to what the indicated page is all about. Compare that to www.yoursite.com/widgets or even www.yoursite.com/index.php?tpl=widgets These naming conventions are both easier for search engine spiders to understand and more importantly, for your readers to understand.

Now the “official” word from the search engines is that they parse and understand any sort of web address that you use. While that may be the case, the reality is that we see over and over that the best rankings are for sites with easy to understand naming conventions.

In competitive business niches, sometimes we are competing with other SEO teams who are matching us step for step in optimizing. We’ve seen that this seemingly small change (easy to setup beforehand — a ton of work once the site is already online!) can allow us to rank better.

An important part of this process is to map out in advance, what categories of site sections you are going to have. There are the obvious: about us, privacy policy, etc. pages as well as the different aspects of your business. How do you decide what to name them?

For many of the businesses that I’ve worked for over the years, the naming of sections use accepted industry jargon. Why not, everyone in the business uses the same language right? Over and over, I’ve seen after doing keyword research that the customers do not use the same words! Going with the industry jargon is costing you money.

In my opinion, it is critical to do or have done keyword research prior to deciding on your naming of site sections. If you use the words and descriptions that new customers use when searching, your site will rank higher, sooner and easier.

Plan your naming convention to be easy for customers to understand and the search engines will like it better too!

In Part 3 we will address keyword research.

The overall simplified description of how to get good rankings is more content, more links. Let’s dig into those concepts and then see how much deeper the rabbit hole goes.

Part 1 – Planning With Content in Mind

More Content – You probably have a core set of pages for your site that you agonized over getting just right. However, most business sites that I see have far too little content. One of the core reasons that we like blogs as your website is that they make it much easier to add more content to your site.

Fresh, unique content can come from a number of angles. There’s news, reviews of others content, your take on the latest issues in your industry, new developments in your business, how to articles, expert information articles, video articles and audio articles.

You can also add press coverage that you receive, image sections, reviews, even story and testimonial sections to your website. You can have user generated content in the form of comments, and forums.

The more content you add, the more hooks you develop that might grab traffic and search engine indexing. Most people don’t realize that search engines rarely index all of your site; if they do and the information isn’t evergreen, it often is supplanted by fresher, more authoritative content, and then search engines will delete your content from their database.

The problem search engines face is that there is too much content being made for them to find, store and make sense of it all. It takes to much processing power and time. Many people are still coming online and creating new websites.

The bigger problem is that there’s just too much crap from the article spinners, content factories, content scrapers, software generated content, multi translated content, etc., etc., all built to fool the search spiders. They cannot index it all. So search engines take shortcuts. They don’t index all of your site unless there’s specific signals that guide them to index it… We’ll get to those later.

A good working strategy is that when you create new, valuable, interesting and unique content you attract both humans (traffic and links) and the search spiders, and that spurs greater indexing of your website.

Plan your site to have easily added sections that you will add content to. More unique content almost always gives you a big advantage over your competition.

Part 2 Directory Naming

Since you must write lots of content, why not make it exciting? Or at least have a point of view. Death to Political Correctness!

The other thing I see over and over again is boring content. Writing without a point or worse, without a unique way of expression – well it’s boring.

“Welcome to our website. We don’t know what to say and we’re ignoring how this intertubes thing works, so we’re happy to shyly share our brochure site (that was out of date in 1999.) Thank Yew.” Yeesh!

Seriously, how do you respond when you see one of these? “Yawn. Let’s see, who else has a website in this business niche?” Click.

“The firsta rule of website writing isa — Doughna Be Boring!” (Little “Gumball Rally” oblique reference there…)

Megan Slick over at SEO Scoop just wrote a sweet little article that frames this important content topic into perspective. Her spin is about consistency – which is very important.

I apologize for my anti-boredom rant. God knows I subject my poor readers to drivel, more often than not.

Ben framed his post as a way to share great posts that you find. Okey Dokey.

However, what if your own great posts are languishing in obscurity? I think the 20 ways he shares are fair game to promote your own high quality posts and get a little action, traffic, and comment love. Let’s face it, none of us wants to toil on in obscurity. I aspire to be a famous guy, that nobody knows! Heh heh.

Now here’s a tip that I often forget myself. There are 99 comments on his post. In those comments are probably 20 or more great ways to share your blog posts with the world. Take the time to read them and note what additional ways might help your posts get some readership.

We all have a useful voice. Yes even you and me, and just cause we’ve (you’ve) hidden (y)our genius under (y)our insecurity don’t mean it has to stay that way… Blog loud and proud baby!