For the past year or two, search engine optimizers have been advising their clients to acquire links and improve site content in order to attract spiders and enhance rankings.
Both Google-bot and Yahoo’s spider, Slurp, find websites to include in their databases by following links from one site to the next. Making it easy for search-spiders to find and transit through your site is the best way to get your original site or new additions indexed as quickly as possible. Knowing how to prepare your content for both site users and search spiders is crucial to getting good placements and keeping site visitors.
There are three easy and inter-related communication tools you can use to market your expertise while creating a highly useful link-path back to topic-specific sections of your site; articles, blogs and newsletters. StepForth uses each of these methods to support the Top10 placements enjoyed by our site and recommend you use them as well. The commitment is not too hard, even if you don’t like writing, and can pay huge dividends along the way.
First of all, your business is an expert at something. There is a reason you got into your field and a reason other people should think about your business. Finding your focus is the first and most important key to regular off-site communications, especially in relation to SEO.
The next step is to figure out the most efficient and expedient way to express the information. Questions you should ask yourself include; how your target audience accesses information about your industry and the best way to distribute the information. Again, the most effective methods are, news-sites, blogs and company newsletters, all of which rely on written articles.
News-Sites: (eg www.isedb.com/news, www.https://murdok.org, http://realtytimes.com)
In most sectors, there are dozens of online magazines that are desperate for quality content. Many industry specific news-sites change their front-page content daily and welcome content from new writers. Based on the democratic nature of the Internet the editors of these sites are almost always happy to communicate with contributors and readers. Each of these sites will provide you with a highly relevant back-link, from each article you write.
We have developed several long-term relationships stemming from our writing for industry news-sites. Some of you may have noticed Ross Dunn, Scott Van Achte and myself appearing on dozens of other websites specific to the SEO/SEM industry. It is a successful strategy that has paid off with amazing contacts, new opportunities, and many service inquiries. Chances are, many of these benefits would never have been realized if we didn’t take the chance and just get writing.
Company Newsletters
Every company that communicates with it’s clients should have a company newsletter. There is no way to underestimate the impact a well written, regularly published company newsletter can have for your clients, potential clients and your business. It can also have a great impact on your web presence. You can post every newsletter you publish to your website. In this way, you create a larger, more relevant website that offers site visitors information on your personal expertise as well as on your products.
When you know your target audience gets literally dozens of newsletters each week (or in some cases, each day), you need to consider how to package your information so it is easily accessible for the public. People are much more likely to read your material if they know what they are going to get, even before they get it. By creating a pre-formatted, standardized template for your newsletters, press releases, news releases or event notifications, you accomplish two important marketing goals in one sitting of keystrokes. First, you have a better platform from which to speak to the public, one that looks and feels better than similarly themed newsletters. Secondly, you brand the product that passes the information, thus creating a sense of continuity and credibility for your readers to believe in. You are creating a competent product.
Check out http://news.stepforth.com and select any past-issue from the drop-down menu. The newsletter comes out in a pre-fabricated HTML template and is sent to readers via Email in HTML format. This produces a newsletter that is standardized and very easy to read. There is generally the same number of articles with specific authors found in the same place every week. By the way, each of these past-issues are open for search engine spidering and help provide the foundation for the StepForth website’s Top10 rankings.
StepForth distributes this newsletter to a growing list of people who have directly subscribed to it by filling in an email text-box found on the front page of our site. Our email list is now huge and we did almost nothing to solicit email addresses from our subscribers. Another benefit we found in publishing a company newsletter is that other newsletters pick up its content (by standing permission, see below) and further propagate StepForth’s link-density.
The final method for easy mass communication is found in Blogs. Blogs are fairly easy to use but the effect of them is much more complex.
Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel – 250-385-1190 Toll Free – 877-385-5526 Fax – 250-385-1198
