Content, content, content – aren’t you ever contented? The web today is a place where content is vast, and many, to an almost infinite degree. Even in SEO we argue that content is the way to go – and it is. If you want to keep it clean and strong for the long run.
This is part of a tutorial series entitled Content Strategy from SEO School where you can learn SEO that works.
Writing out content does not make a business. It does not make you rank in the search engines. It does not help people identify who you are as a brand. That’s where content strategy comes in.
Content strategy is the way you outline your content – giving it a purpose and an identity of its own. A content without a purpose is a messy one. A content without an identity will confuse your readers.
Content strategy deals with who you are, your target audience, your writing style, (or writing voice as some would prefer to call it), and your marketing strategy.
What do I mean?
Well, to give you a practical example, let’s take SEO Hacker’s content Strategy:
SEO Hacker’s Content strategy: Teaching. Tutorials, news (and how you can apply the news to your website), and more tutorials! This is our core content – this is who we are as a blog, as a company, as a publisher. This is our identity to our readers and this is the main purpose of this blog.
Our target audience: Learners. Webmasters. Web Developers. Entrepreneurs. All who want to rank in the search engine results page in the range of beginner – intermediate with minimal technical knowledge.
Our writing style: Clean, concise, straight-to-the point and extremely easy to comprehend.
Our Marketing Strategy: Promote it in Social Media, Promote it as we comment on other blogs, Promote it as a resource in other publisher’s website, Promote it anywhere and everywhere we can in the web! We don’t use cellphones or friends to promote it. We promote it in places where it matters.
All the while, we are building our Content Structure within an SEO mindset. No, our articles didn’t go to the first page of Google in 1 year – and we had to endure it. But it was all worth the wait – right now it takes 30 minutes to a day for a newly published article to be in the first page for its supposed target keywords / keyphrases.
How did we make our content rank?
That’s all dependent on our SEO strategy – which is built from solid content. After the content is built, we check its SEO friendliness by applying on-site optimization techniques. Then we hit the publish button.
What On Site optimization techniques did we use?
- We optimized our Title tags for each and every post
- We Made sure that each and every relevant keyword is interlinked with the proper article
- We fixed each and every image to make sure that it has the proper keyword inside
- And much more stuff!
We’ve outlined the best On Site Optimization Techniques in the SEO Course we’ve put up – where we teach all the On Site optimization techniques we use for each and every article and page we have in SEO Hacker.
Tips for Keeps: Create an outline for your Content Strategy now!
About Sean
Thanks for sharing the information, that just provided good insight into the content strategy.
I couldn’t agree more. Creating content with not a single goal in mind is like going on a trip with no map. A good content takes time, effort (and money if you paid someone to write) and therefore deserves better planning.
Hmmm, Here Sean you absolutely correct, content is always king for website for generate exact also known as targeted traffics to a blog, But we have consider about the writing content also because our words should be more comprehensible for the readers and make sure it should be very easy to understand that what we are going to say also known as teaching them the correct path way. Nice tutorial very enjoyable to read this stuffs.
thank you,
Mohamed Shajid
Today itself I found your blog Sean Si, I read almost 5 blogs today and I will share this blog as tutorial to my team to follow it everyday kindly don’t disappoint us.
Thanks for the post Sean!
I especially like your points about having content that is clear and focused. We need to ask who we are speaking to, and what are they interested in? I also agree that it takes consistent effort over to time to achieve solid and sustainable rankings.
Wow – yes direct to the point discussion of what “content strategy” is. You know what, Google Adsense Keyword Tool is helpful to boost SEO, but how can we really use it? It’s a matter I have to dig here. I want to learn more here…
Content is not all that matters when it comes to seo, and internet marketing.
Yes, content is important, but I think people shouldn’t give more importance to it than focusing on the goal of their site, and what their site has offer to their visitors.
Thanks Sean!
This is an excellent post about organizing thoughts for content production. Without an ironclad plan of action, website owners are simply stabbing in the dark. Before content product, webmasters must know who they plan to market their services to. Your post provides an excellent outline to accomplish this task.
Thanks again Sean.
I agree with you Sean. You guys came back just over 2 years ago and have achieved an alexa ranking of 22293, an amazing feat you achieved! I had been following you people since day 1 and no doubt, WONDERFUL content marketing strategy out there.