Using Content to Bring in Traffic

Search Engine optimization, or SEO is one of the most expensive aspects of online sales. Having a good conversion rate is important but if nobody is coming to your site then it won’t matter how high your conversion rate is. One of the biggest problems that most people have is how to achieve better rankings with the search engines. The problem is that nobody really knows for sure what will help your site rank with the search engines.

Content is the Only Guarantee

The only thing that people know for sure ranks with the search engines is good content. Providing well written, informative content helps to ensure that your website will bring in more traffic. Two things are achieved when you place extra content on your website. Your website will begin to rank for search terms that relate to that content. That improves the odds of people ending up on your site by simply searching for a specific term. You also improve the odds of someone sharing your content with someone else. The better your content is the more likely this is to happen. Given time this can lead to many referral links which most experts believe improves how important the search engines view your website as.

How to Produce Good Content

Unfortunately, there is no formula for how to produce good content. The best advice is to produce a lot of content which is grammatically correct and which gives useful information. Try to make the content interesting to read. The more content you have, the more likely you are to have users who find what you are offering useful.

How to Get Enough Content

Obviously the cheapest method is to write the content yourself. If you want to produce large quantities of useful content in a shorter period of time there are many freelance writers who offer their services.  While this is a good option there are some things to keep in mind.

1. Don’t be too Cheap
   It is possible to find people who will write 400-500 word articles for under $1.00. This may seem like a great idea since it allows you to produce a lot of content at a very reasonable price. The problem is that like everything else, you get what you pay for. Typically those who will work for this low of a price do not speak English natively. This will come across in the articles with glaring grammatical problems and phrasing that doesn’t feel natural. Remember, 1000 bad articles are not as useful as 1 good article. Typically for 300-400 words you can expect to pay between $10 and $15 for someone who is capable.
2. Roll the Content out at Intervals
   There is no concrete proof, but many experts feel that search engines will penalize websites which produce too much content too quickly.  No one knows for sure if this is a fact or not and the number that people feel is safe varies significantly but many feel that somewhere between 5 and 10 a day is safe for a new website.
3. Read what you Write
   Think of it like when you were in high school. You probably wouldn’t have turned in a paper without proof reading it. You need to look at it the same way with content being published to the web. Read it and make sure it is interesting and easy to read. Adjust it if necessary.