Without content, you have no way to attract traffic, no way to get users to return to your website, and no possible way to build brand awareness and develop credibility as an authority in your chosen niche. Content is king and when it comes to building a profitable blog, content is the most important element of your entire campaign. When it comes to building content that will entice visitors to return to your site and essentially become “sticky”, you want a solid balance between offering high quality, relevant content and material that incorporates your primary keywords phrases.
You are writing for PEOPLE first and search engines second, so keep that in mind when outsourcing or writing your blog’s material. To begin, in order to create content that will help optimize your website’s ranking within the search engines, you need to conduct keyword research. We will cover a quick start process to developing keyword swipe files in the next chapter, for now; let’s take a quick look at why keywords are so important in the development of your blog.
Let’s say you have a blog about golf, and you found the keyword phrase “golf ball comparisons” You might want to create a blog post-titled “Golf Ball Comparisons – The Top 10 Golf Balls Reviewed”. Then you would simply write an article based on that topic encompassing relevant keywords. For example, you might find the following phrases: Golf ball comparisons, Golf balls compared, Golf ball reviews. These are all similar phrases, and you can choose to do one of two things. You can either choose to create a different article for each phrase, or you can create a single article and include all of the phrases in the text of the article and the tags for the post. I would write a separate article for each phrase, but I would space them out a few days apart so that they don’t appear to be repetitive. This allows you to target both keyword phrases while keeping your blog updated with fresh content.
When creating my blogs, I focus on adding in 10-15 posts to start, adding in 2-3 posts / articles per week on a regular basis. These articles and posts are usually based on the keyword phrases that have the best balance between traffic and competition. Once I have at least 10 posts published, I will add in some posts that will be posted automatically at regular intervals. If I have a very large list of keywords, I will add about 52 posts and set them to update weekly for one year. If I found fewer keywords, I will update monthly, and I only need to create 12 posts. Ideally you want to update at least once per month. Weekly is better, the more often you update the more traffic you are likely to get. The search engines also prefer sites with fresh content. They tend to rank pages on sites that update often higher than pages on sites that are rarely updated and their spiders (otherwise referred to as “crawlers” will visit your site far more frequently if it’s regularly updated).
