In the podcast she asked me about changes to how we should approach writing content for our websites, and articles to be published elsewhere, in a way that is acceptable in an internet marketing world that is under the Google Panda spotlight.

You can listen to the interview here:

We went on to discuss affiliate marketing and the importance of having multiple income streams.

Fiona is continuing this series of podcasts to provide up to the minute tips and information to those who want to create successful businesses from home.

For information about my content writing services contact me!

About Custom Web Content

Content such as web articles, blog posts and press releases are all different types of custom content that are used by internet marketers to help improve your off-site SEO. If you’re not sure what that means, it is basically content that is relevant to your business, which is used to generate links back to your site. The better the quality of the links, the more highly your site will rank in the search engines.

High Quality Content for Lasting Search Engine Results

Changes that have recently occurred in the way that Google indexes sites have made it clear that quality, not quantity is number one. If you’re aiming to be recognised and to be ranked highly by the search engines, then good quality links that stem from valuable, original content are essential. Strong SEO practices should employ techniques that focus on the creation of unique content that is equally relevant to readers as it is to search engine bots.

Poor Content Can be Costly for SEO

So how do you avoid making costly mistakes? Well there are some key things you should be wary of, whether doing your own SEO or engaging an SEO expert to carry out the optimisation for you. Start by casting a critical eye over the content and assessing how unique it is. High quality content means either you or your SEO provider delivers well written, thoughtful web copy that is interesting and relevant. The copy is placed on respected, relevant or authority sites with strong links from those sites to your web pages.

Poor quality content that is crammed with keywords and lacking structure, or exists in multiple versions with very little obvious difference between articles will not hold your site in good stead. These articles are often placed on less relevant websites, with numerous links, but of significantly less value than a few strongly placed links. In fact, the chances are this kind of content and linking practices will do you more harm than good.

If you value your business and you want to grab hold of every opportunity to succeed, then good SEO practices are essential. Quality custom content is a must if you want to climb the search engine rankings to secure a spot at the top for the long haul.

Why Custom Content?

Chances are that your website has dozens, if not hundreds of competitors on the Internet, each trying to sell the same product or provide the same service. Many of these sites have are just a matter of a few words here and a few commas there of being complete rip-offs of one another.

Having content for your site that’s unique to your site helps you stand apart from your competitors. Also, custom content written specifically for your site helps you better market to your target audience and emphasize the strengths of your business.

Reprocessed content that’s been recycled and regurgitated from other websites doesn’t grab the attention of visitors to your site, doesn’t differentiate your site from competitors and may land you in trouble with search engines. When search engines rank pages in search results, sites with content too close to that of other sites are often excluded from top ranks. Having content that is unique helps you avoid this pitfall, and ensures that combined with proper SEO work, your site has a great chance of getting to top spots on search result rankings.

What To Look For?

When searching for a custom content provider, it’s important to find a professional operation that can provide quality content at competitive prices. When seeking a content provider, consider the following qualities:

- Examples. Ask questions about what other businesses the provider has created content for, and ask to see work samples. This helps you better establish the competency and skill level of your provider.

- Spelling and grammar. When reviewing a prospective provider’s past work, check to see if it is grammatically correct and also check for spelling errors. The occasional slip is unavoidable, but work that is rife with errors marks a lack of professionalism and can also be detrimental to your business if that provider is chosen.

- Timeframe. Can the provider work to your schedule and provide you the content you need when you need it?

- Depth. Does the content provider have writers in the stable who are qualified to write about the subject matter you want them to cover? Unique content that is erroneous can harm your professional reputation.

- Pricing. Unique content isn’t going to be dirt cheap, but it shouldn’t be outrageously priced either. Shop around among reliable providers to get a good idea what the median price should be. Also, be sure to deal with a provider that gives quotes on prices upfront, so you can avoid unexpectedly large bills later.

By carefully choosing the right custom content provider, you can get quality service that will help propel your online business to the top of the search results, and the top of your clients go-to list for products and services.

However, unless you’ve got some writing talent actually producing high quality content can be something like pulling teeth, and can take up far too much valuable time. Many website owners soon realise that writing their own content doesn’t go very far towards promoting their business or making their website a valuable source of information, and so seek an alternative source of content for their website.

Sources of Premium Written Content

One of the first places many website owners go to source premium written content are the various freelancing websites, where a website owner posts a job and they get bids from numerous freelancers all trying to gain work. This can be a great way of accessing good quality content, but it can also be rather hit and miss.

Gone are the days when all the people advertising themselves as “writers” are actually that. More and more people are turning to SEO article writing as a way of earning a few extra dollars, without any real writing experience or ability. However, they get work simply because they don’t charge as much as professional writers, and will thus produce quantity over quality. Unfortunately, it’s become clear that the search engines are overlooking sites populated with low quality, keyword stuffed articles.

Site Visitors Want a Positive Reading Experience

There are other sources of premium written content, however, that offer consistent quality time after time. Such sites are dedicated to the production of high quality written material for businesses, whether it be in the form of straight articles or news stories, or press releases designed for promotional purposes. These companies generally have several writers who understand the needs of website owners, and who know how to produce well researched and written articles that are optimised for particular keywords and keyword phrases without offering a poor reading experience.

Many content production companies offer packages to suit the needs of various sized businesses and individuals. It’s usually beneficial to drip feed articles to a site over a length of time rather than writing many articles and putting them all up simultaneously. Regularly adding new content keeps the site fresh, and ensures the site is regularly spidered and updated by Google. Google seems to have a preference for sites that aren’t static, but are rather added to and worked on regularly.

Ultimately, to guarantee the success of your business website you need premium written content which is interesting enough for website users to actually read, and which provides genuine information of the type your visitor is searching for. If you offer products or services through your website, keeping your site regularly updated provides potential customers with the assurance that you’ll be available for after care or service should they require it.

Often people consider the search engines first and their website visitors second, but this is the wrong way of going about creating a quality site. Yes, it’s important to have a site that ranks well, but it’s even more important that your site succeeds with human viewers. Yes, it’s crucial to know what keywords and keyword phrases people searching for such a site will use, but it’s even more important to consider what sort of information such searchers are wanting to find. If someone visits a website they’ve found through a Google search and it doesn’t provide the information they’re after, they’ll very quickly go back to their original search and find another website.

The Best Sources of Custom Website Content

There are several ways of getting custom website content. The first, and least expensive method, is to create it yourself. Many people take this step initially because they want to save on the cost of website creation, which is understandable. However, if your time is limited, and you’re not a fantastic writer, this could ultimately work against you. You need to know how to create articles that are not only well written but enjoyable and informative to the reader. If your articles are keyword stuffed, poorly written, and provide little information, they’re not going to succeed, and readers will quickly click off the page. For this reason, one of the best ways of getting good quality content is to outsource the content creation process to someone who knows how to write high quality articles which appeal to both readers and search engine bots.

Don’t Waste Time With Poor Quality Content

A lot of people go straight to freelancing websites to find custom website content, which is understandable considering the enormous number of people who bid for article writing jobs on such sites. Unfortunately, this method can be a little bit hit and miss. There are some fantastic writers offering their services on such sites, but there are also a lot of people who aren’t so fantastic, and who are offering their services very inexpensively. It’s often tempting to hire someone who will write articles for peanuts, but almost inevitably the results are sub par. Sure there are some great writers who don’t know how to charge what they’re worth, but more often you get what you paid for. The best method of finding someone to create high quality articles for your business is to head straight for a professional content creation site, where you know that you’ll be provided with high quality articles in a timely manner.

Outsourcing custom website content can be a simple and easy process, and can streamline your efforts to create a high quality website that is enjoyed by both human visitors and those pesky search engine bots.

No More Reheated Content

The services most recently being targeted by the search engines specialized in re-spinning and submitting content through private blog networks. These services have been hit with a website de-indexing campaign that has rendered their future usefulness to clients negligible.

Search engines like Google are committed to detecting out duplicate and bogus content, and have now updated their algorithms to identify  recycled content and the websites that contain it will, and have, suffered as a result. With this somewhat shady method of link-building gone now, more than ever, the need for quality, unique content for your websites is vital.

Too many people over-think strategies for improved search engine visibility.  If you ensure that the content you add to your sites is original, well written and relevant, it will work for you. Focus on this simple concept, rather than trying to outsmart Google, and your website rankings will benefit, and let’s face it, online businesses live or die by traffic volume, and having a good search engine ranking is key to getting the traffic you need.

How Premium Written Content Helps With Marketing

In addition to helping with search engine results, having fresh, unique content also helps you with marketing your online business. Quality content helps you by:

- Establishing your site as an authority: By having serious, well-researched articles on your site, you establish your site as a reliable source of information. This credibility creates trust and loyalty among your prospective customers.

- Getting visitors to come back. By regularly posting new articles and content, you give visitors to your website a reason to come back and visit again and again. By getting visitors engaged in your site, you increase the chance that you’ll be able to make a sale.

- Standing out from the competition. Unique content allows you to draw a contrast between yourself and competitors who may be using the same rehashed copy that everyone else is using. This difference can help elevate your business over the competition.

- Target niche audiences. With unique and original content, you can better market your site toward targeted demographics. Bland, generalized sites do not have this advantage.

>> Enquire now about having premium written content created for your online business

Where to Source Custom Content

For this reason, it’s essential that website owners get it right with respect to custom content right from the start. Obviously, those with plenty of time on their hands can create their own content, if, of course, their English language skills are up to par, and they’re familiar with the form of writing necessary to produce high quality articles which appeal to both readers and search engines. Alternatively, they can purchase high quality content from a reputable content creation business.

Drip Feeding Content is the Best Strategy

Ideally, a website populated with custom content won’t have hundreds of pages added in a day. Doing this is sure to attract the attention of the search engines, and not in a good way. A website that grows naturally is one that will be less likely to attract negative attention, and to do this, well written pages are added to the site gradually, at the most a few new pages a week. This ensures a couple of different things: first, that there’s always new content for the search engines to spider, and second that there’s always new content for readers to find. This shows genuine visitors that a website is being constantly updated, which generally tells the visitor that the business is current and up to date. When a visitor gets to a site and discovers it hasn’t been updated since 2009, they’re more reluctant to trust it as a valuable source of either information or products.

Cheap Content is Rarely Good Content

Fortunately, it’s possible to get high quality custom content packages created that allow website owners to add well written articles to their sites on a regular basis, ensuring the site is always kept up to date with the latest information, and that the search engines always have something to spider and to rank. There are providers of very inexpensive content which rely on the premise of “quantity over quality” and will often offer articles for as little as $1 to $2 each. These should be avoided like the plague! It is far better to put one high quality, well written article on your website, than 10 extremely mediocre ones.

Simply put, in order to build a high quality website, it’s necessary to use high quality, 100% original custom content, and it’s important to keep building the website at a gradual pace. Such websites invariably outrank those which are built with lower quality material, and which aren’t kept regularly updated.

Sourcing High Quality Custom Content

One of the best ways of getting custom content to suit your business is to invest in the services of a professional content company. Such companies generally employ several expert writers, who are experienced in researching a multitude of topics and creating articles that are interesting to read and are also designed to appeal to the search engines. In order to create such articles, the writers utilise keywords and keyword phrases in high enough densities that the search engines know what to rank them for, but put together in such a way that they read well to the end user.

There was a time when putting as many keywords as possible on a written page was desirable (and many website owners loaded up sites with custom content that was barely readable gibberish), but this has not been the case for many years. Back then, the search engines weren’t clever enough to distinguish between content written for them, and content written for the people who will eventually land on the page! Now, Google in particular, is very fussy about what it considers good content, and the moment its bots detect a page that is “stuffed” with keywords, it takes actions to ensure that page is delisted from the search results, or at the very least, placed so low that no human users will be able to find it.

Achieving High Search Engine Listings

Ever since Google’s recent Panda update, more and more website owners and business people who have relied on their search engine rankings have discovered the hard way that poor content and bad SEO practices are no longer tolerated. Many people have lost thousands of dollars of income as their website has plummeted from the top of the search engines for their keywords, to somewhere so far down that the site may as well have vanished altogether. In order to avoid such a circumstance, it’s becoming more crucial now than ever before to source high quality custom content that is written primarily for the end reader. Articles written in poor, barely readable English will be penalised, so there’s no point in relying on high volume poor quality articles.

Excellently written custom content is now the only hope most websites have of ever remaining competitive, and for those whose businesses and livelihoods rely on such content, there is no point in taking shortcuts.

Some Content Writers typically work on a fixed or flat-rate, such as word-count or per document rate, which is agreed upon by the client and contractor. Sometimes, premium written content requires the client to pay a substantial sum of money for excellent writing.

Professional content writers, whether in-house or contractors, have the ability to effectively communicate concepts and ideas in articles, copy, documents, newsletters, and more. Clear and concise written information is an absolute necessity for businesses to promote their products and services to customers and clients. When a customer or client visits your website, they should be greeted with informative, substantial, and error-free copy.

Business website content writers know clean and concise copy is one of the elements of a website that prompts potential customers and clients to stay on your page to investigate your products and services. Poor or sloppy content will lose customers and clients.

As basic as it may seem, excellent writing is actually a difficult and very special skill. It can be a difficult task for many professionals at all levels to effectively communicate via the written word.

Most Business Website Content Writers are experts in particular disciplines or subject matter. Some Content Writers have general and broad-spectrum skills and have some basic knowledge about many topics. Clients select Content Writers with the knowledge and skills for each assignment and project.

A business that has a large group of professional Business Website Content Writers with a wide range of knowledge available to utilize whenever needed is much more economical and cost-effective then fully staffing an office with full-time employee writers. Premium Content Writers will also typically conduct extensive research to ensure the accuracy of their deliverables.

Purchasing premium written content is more than just buying someone else’s words. It is an investment in your business. Consider this, premium written content, whether for an article, newsletter, or website is the same as premium advertising. When you use premium advertising, you are promoting and expanding your business to gain a larger market share. Well-written and compelling copy, whether on your website or product brochures, is an absolute necessity for your business to survive and succeed. Yes, your clients and customers will take notice when your website is well-written.

I’ve been writing press releases, both online and offline, for over 20 years, and to say that both their use and purpose have changed, is an understatement. These days, through online press release distribution services, just about anyone can instantly send out media releases to online news sites and niche-focused blogs.

The fact that these digitally delivered press releases can, depending on the distribution service used, include live links, has not gone unnoticed by internet marketers. Increasingly, online press releases are being used for link building, and for SEO in general.

With that in mind, writing online press releases with these objectives in mind has become an important part of my content writing business. That I am able to combine offline marketing/PR experience with internet marketing and SEO strategies, gives me a unique perspective from which to approach my clients media release needs, and to observe how others should be creating and using them to greater effect.

Unfortunately, I am increasingly seeing online press releases that are being poorly written, distributed and leveraged. At best they fail to achieve the maximum benefit for their subject, and at worst, they leave an unprofessional online impression.

Control over quality and accuracy

Press releases that are amateurish and badly assembled, might remain online for as long as professionally crafted ones – potentially forever. Business owners need to realize this and understand that what is being broadcast to the universe on their behalf, could reflect on them for many years to come.

Leveraging your press releases by adding them to a Media Room section of your website will stamp “Authority” in a way that is only matched by real testimonials. If, after seeing a press release that has been created for you, and which carries your name, your business or product name, you decide against adding it to your website, then it’s time to step back and ask why. If you are happy for it to be published on thousands of other websites, leaving your online footprint in its wake, why is it not good enough to add to your site?

Lost in translation?

Often a clear business message can only be created by a person who ‘gets’ you and your business, and who is able to understand your objectives. There are nuances of language that can affect the readability of a media release, and industry semantics that can determine whether a release is picked up by a trade journal.

If your online press releases do not reflect these, you are creating lost opportunities.

The “art” of news-jacking

By understanding and being able to interpret your objectives, your marketing writer should be able to identify current news stories and strategically apply them to a press release for your business. This ‘news jacking’ – riding the wave of something already making headlines – is a great strategy to employ when you don’t have anything ‘newsworthy’ to publish, but need to inject a little SEO magic into your website. Commenting, through a media release, on a niche-related news story is yet another way to enhance your authority on a topic.

Here is an example – topic: property investing, news jacked: interest rates

Long and rambling copy that is merely a vehicle for links

Back in the pre-digital age, press releases were governed by tight guidelines, including word count, and if they were not adhered to, would be immediately ‘binned’ by editors and journalists. While many online distribution services no longer have a word limit (though most recommend < 800 words), long and padded media releases will continue to be ignored by legitimate News sites – where content is actually read before being published.

Failure to use boilerplates correctly

The boilerplates on press releases provide a great opportunity to establish niche-authority and market presence, though too often they are either omitted completely from a release or have only lip-service paid to them.

Knowing when to publish

Ideal days and times to publish press releases really do exist, and ignorance of them exemplifies an amateurish approach, and squanders the benefits that can be achieved by this type of attention to detail.

Using a distribution service without understanding its nuances

Professionals understand that subtle adjustments can be made within a distribution system to increase the reach of a press release, including the use of images, selection of distribution channels and naming of the releases. These are all quite subtle, but make a world of difference when executed correctly.

Why more is not always better

This probably goes back to understanding a premium distribution service and how to correctly use it. Press releases are most powerful when they are targeted to, and published on, relevant niches sites (or within specific geographical areas).

Having links coming from these sites are valuable, initially. But if links are coming from the same sites for ongoing press releases, those links lose value each time they are used – an opinion reinforced in a recent post by Tim Grice on SEOmoz.com:

Links from unique domains?

Sure, the first time you send a press release out all your links will be from unique domains. Maybe if you use multiple distribution services you will get plenty of links from unique domains. However if you use these services month after month, all you’re doing is acquiring low quality links from the same domains over and over again.

Knowing how to avoid this is goes a long way to delivering better results for my clients, and is not something a production line approach will deliver.

So, while online press releases are certainly great for link building and SEO, you should also consider the more subtle, but no less important, benefits of reputation and authority (yours, your businesses, your products and services) and ensure your releases are created and published accordingly.

Oh, and don’t forget to ask to see press release examples from any writers you are entrusting your online reputation to!