Web content and SEO

Content

The word “content” has always been a big buzz word in the internet marketing industry. Apart from generating traffic, content has a huge part in determining how websites rank in search engines.

· Adding fresh content regularly keeps search spiders coming back again and again. By creating more content, you have more opportunities to share your information, link to you, and increase the ranking for the optimized keywords on that page.

· Create unique content. Avoid duplicate content as it is considered a spamming technique by search engines.

· Use formatting elements to highlight headings and important keywords. Headline tags, bold text and bullet points are a great way to ensure your keywords stand out. However, do not overdo, highlight only when necessary so that the text look natural to search engine spiders.

Make use of the 6 crucial tips for article writing. After you have a well-written article, you still need SEO techniques to market your content.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Internet marketing can be classified into white hat, black hat, and gray hat marketing. Engage only in white hat SEO methods that are approved by search engines. Listed below are some basic SEO techniques.

(a) Search engine submission

Search engine submission is one of the first few crucial steps in SEO.

ActiveSearchResults (ASR) Search Engine is one of the free submission sites that I have been using since I started hubbing. ASR allows free submission of 10 URLs. It will consider request to increase the maximum no. of free submission on an ad hoc basis.

Other free sites that I used are AddMe, Entireweb, Jayde, e-SiteSecrets, ineedhits, SearchSight, Websquash, and many other sites.

The newsletters from these sites contain a wealth of information regarding content writing, SEO tips & techniques, SEO-related topics, etc. These sites also have quite a number of free tools, especially useful for newbies and those with limited budget.

(b) Social bookmarking

The fastest way to get search engines to visit a webpage or website is through social bookmarking. Once we bookmark a webpage, Google search indexes the link depending on the value of keywords in the website. Also, posting interesting content that appeals to a larger audience will lead to increased awareness and traffic to your website.

Social bookmarking also helps you to generate backlinks to your website. When more people bookmark your website, the more organic links you get. More backlinks result in higher page rank in search engines.

Some of the popular social bookmarking sites are a1-webmarks.com, blinklist.com, bibsonomy.org, delicio.us.com, digg.com, diigo.com, faves.com, folkd.com, reddit.com, slashdot.org, etc.

(c) Articles submission

Article submission is one of the most popular methods to promote content, as well as to build good relevant links for your website. A link to the author’s website contained in each article submitted serves to bring targeted traffic as well as to raise Google PageRank by creating more incoming links to a website. When submitting an article, create a link within the article or in the “bio box” or “author box”.

Article submission tools make it very easy to submit to hundreds or even thousands of article sites, but have also resulted in article spamming. Google spiders are finely tuned to spot such spamming. So it is advisable just to submit to a few top article directory sites and not to every such site available on the internet. A list of some top article directories is given in the link below.

(d) Link building

Link building is a long and slow process. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to link building. Do not engage in spammy, black-hat SEO tactics that are forbidden by search engines. Black-hat tactics only bring short-term success and might landed up having your web pages de-indexed when found out.

Is it worth paying for submission services?

There are quite a number of internet marketing websites offering their services for submissions to hundreds of search engines, article directories, social bookmarking sites, etc for a small monthly fee or a one-time payment. Automated software is also widely available.

However, as far as I know, many major sites do not accept automated submission. Although some submission websites state that all their submissions are done manually to maximize the approval rate, I am quite skeptical about this because the amount of manpower required in handling the manual submission to hundreds of sites is tremendous.

To-date, I am still hesitating as to whether or not I should use paid submission for my hubs. I will be very happy to hear from those who have actually used and benefitted from such services.

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