How to Add Useful Content to Your Site. . . and Get Results

It’s good to know that you need useful content on your site. It’s even better to know why you need useful content on your site (If you aren’t sure what I mean, you might want to read: For Google, the Only Content is Useful Content.

But how do you get it? What separates so-so text from highly compelling copy that draws in readers (and prospects), then turns them into customers? Let’s see what other online marketing pros have to say:

Develop a great resource – Matt Cutts, Google

“Have a well-rounded site: great content has to be the foundation of any good site because mediocre content tends not to attract exceptional links by itself, and if you’re trying to get exceptional links on crappy content, you’re going to be pushing uphill. It’s much better to have great content that gets those links naturally. Rather than having something that’s not that interesting and trying to push, push, push and bug people and send out spam emails asking for links and those sorts of things. So a well-rounded site has interesting, useful content, great resources, great information and that naturally attracts links.”

Post cheat sheets and checklists – Sam Niccolls, SEOmoz

“Cheat sheets and checklists make great linkbait – cheat sheets are great for driving site engagement, links and bringing people back to the site.”

View an example of a checklist: A Checklist of Preparing a Working WordPress Blog http://blog.overscaled.com/index.php/2009/04/a-checklist-of-preparing-a-working-wordpress-blog/. Cheat sheets are clearly laid-out steps or tasks which lead to a tangible goal, something like “How to automatically post Del.icio.us links to your blog” that help folks streamline a process.

Let your customer speak for you – Bryan Eisenburg, FutureNow

“Leverage the voice of the customer (often obtainable from social media, etc.) in product descriptions, category groupings, reviews and ratings, and letters of recommendation. Your customer can say things about your business that you cannot say.”

So if you don’t already have testimonials, quotes and success stories in your marketing arsenal, it’s time to go get some. Be sure to rotate or “freshen” them, as well. A 5-year-old testimonial won’t persuade nearly as well as a current endorsement.

Answer questions that lots of people are asking – Dan Thies, The SEO Coach

Research questions that your target audience wants answered by:

• Using Yahoo Answers
• Participating in forums and groups
• Trying general keywords in search
• Collecting 10-20 top questions being asked, including questions that people don’t ask, but should
• Identifying pre-sell questions and post sell questions
• Creating social bookmark feeds that populate a web page on a given topic

Turn real-time conversations into web content – Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

Your tweets, chats, facebook status updates, and the like can be turned into a web page of topical content. For example, any of your tweets about a given topic, like organic SEO, can be compared and edited to become unique content that belongs only to you. Also, realtime chat on your website can be edited into user-generated, long tail keyword rich content on your site. These are sources of content that typically do not get indexed in search engines anyway, but could be useful content with a little editing. After which, you can employ a social media monitoring to monitor your efforts.

Leverage syndicated content effectively – Rand Fishkin

Syndicated content, including articles, products, images, videos, etc., present several problems if you reuse it on your site:

• It’s duplicate content.
• Most require you to link back to the original source.
• The content might not earn search traffic.

However, you can make syndicated content unique to your site by:

• Adding an editor’s note.
• Rewriting the piece and/or headline. Keep in mind that, often, you only need a small portion of the original piece and can then “write around” it to flesh out your own content.
• Adding user-generated content (such as allowing comments).

Use a few of these solutions to earn link references to your content, and it will likely rank well in search engines

More ideas from Matt Cutts:

• Original research can mean great gains for your site. If someone does even a little bit of work to dig into a subject, they are a lot more likely to get links.
• If you do a conference presentation, remember to post it. That’s a great way to get links because people will live blog it, link to your website, etc.
• Get a blog and establish yourself as an authority. There’s no excuse for a company today not to have a blog. It’s really not that hard to do. Posting funny pictures is one way, but build your blog up as a resource of good articles, how-tos, tutorials, etc.
• Make sure your site has good site architecture. You’d be amazed at how many sites don’t think about “Can my site be crawled? Can my site URLs be bookmarked? Can Google get to all the pages on my site?” Make it easy to link to individual pieces of content on your site.

HubSpot recently published “Marketing Data,” compiled from 2,500 businesses. The following chart explains again why you need a well-executed content development plan:

This chart shows that sites with more web pages indexed in Google tend to get more leads than sites with fewer indexed web pages. Note the exponential increase in leads when a site reaches a certain “tipping point” (the ascending arrow) with its volume of indexed web pages.