Our team has been working hard on outreach emails, backlink exchanges, and writing articles. In less than a year, our search traffic tripled, Nightwatch has been listed as one of the best SEO tools available on the market, and our users’ base has been steadily growing ever since.

Let’s explore some of our favorite and most successful link building strategies:

1. Link reclamation — unlinked mentions

Link reclamation does not have to be limited to fixing the broken links (which you can identify using Nightwatch for example). It relates to any opportunity where your brand or resource is mentioned and could be linked to, but is not.

Missing out on the opportunity to get a backlink for your brand where your business is already mentioned is like passing on the 5000 sales just because you forgot to include the “buy” button.

To understand and master how you can use link reclamation to your technique, you need the right tools. Our recent discovery — Brand24 has been a massive help in discovering new potential backlinks opportunities.

It’s a social listening tool which allows you to “access the mentions about your brand across the web, from social media to influential publishers.” You can monitor relevant keywords and spot the opportunities for a backlink.

With Brand24, we’ve identified the unlinked mentions to Nightwatch landing page, as well as discovered SEO-related forums and Twitter users who are talking about our tool. We’ve also taken advantage of monitoring certain keywords, such as “SEO tool” or “backlink tracker” to get an insight into the industry and our potential target audience.

Here’s how the dashboard looks like:

So if monitoring and “fixing” broken links seems daunting, start with monitoring your brand’s mentions and relevant keywords where you could ask the authors to link back to you. Easy enough, right?

Action steps:

1) Start using a tool to monitor the SEO performance of your website, for example, Nightwatch, and a social listening tool, such as Brand24.

2) Identify broken links on the external websites and reach out to owners to replace the link with the working one. And yes, you can do that in Nightwatch backlinks tracker.


3) Start monitoring the keywords related to your brand. In our example, it could be “SEO tool” as well as your brand name. Then, ask the website’s owner to link to your page.

Bonus tip: After identifying broken links or unlinked mention try to connect with website owners before you reach out to them for a favor, for example, using social media.

2. Comments

Disqus

The era of posting the comments with the link to your website anywhere possible and Google giving it the importance in your search rankings is, thank God, over. It seems like nobody misses spammy, irrelevant comments popping up under each of the published articles, and the marketers community got over it fast as the party was over.

Does it mean that comments have absolutely no value now?

This still seems to be rather a mystery, though nobody has doubts that blog commenting got labeled as a much less relevant SEO strategy than it used to be. Data shows that Google might be giving little importance to this user-generated content, but you could take advantage of it using the same way you would use social media: connecting with relevant people and identifying backlinks opportunities.

We particularly like to use Disqus, because it is stated to be crawlable (though the indexing is out of their hands), meaning potentially SEO-friendly. In addition, their system is easy to manage with a built-in spam filter, and it seems like it is widely used by many high-quality marketing-related blogs, so the commenting is fast and easy.

Bonus tip: Start tracking the blogs and the number of comments you write and use it later to connect with the bloggers using the outreach.

3. Guest posting

Writing articles for other blogs, especially those with high domain authority (DA) is a neat strategy which search engines are willing to reward. Guest posting is a fairly common practice which brings you not only a valuable backlink but also an increased brand awareness, connections, and recognition as an expert in the industry.

It does take effort, resilience, and a creative mind. If we can sell you our tip here, that would be: experiment with your guest posts pitch and outreach method!

It took us a while to master our pitch, and we did not limit ourselves to emails. We’ve also used Twitter DMs and LinkedIn to build connections and reach out to potentially interested bloggers. And it worked like a miracle, so you might want to consider adding it to your outreach strategy, too.

To learn more about creating an effective guest posting strategy make sure to read our article about acquiring 150+ high-authority backlinks in 8 months with blogger outreach.

Bonus: You can also download or copy our guest post content calendar template as well as our list of high DA marketing blogs accepting guest posts and add your own.

What’s the most important part of link building? Experiment, experiment, experiment! Link building is a long-term game, and you will eventually rip the benefits.

In a recent article, we identified citations as one of the next big things in SEO content. Citations are nothing new in the world of copy. Any copywriter worth his or her salt will know exactly how to go about building a basic citation into online content. As for the rest of us…well, if it’s been a while since we were in school, tackling citations may pose a bit of a challenge. Since these handy little credibility builders are the next big thing in SEO content, we think it’s high time for a crash course in citations that includes some best practices to put to use.

What Is A Citation?

According to Forbes, a citation boils down your company (and hopefully your website) being mentioned on someone else’s website. The sentence you just read is a citation. It’s one of the simplest things to build into content. It doesn’t take a lot of technical understanding or fancy formatting. Overall, citations are easy to create. The true footwork is in ensuring your citations are the best.

10 Best Practices You Need To Implement Today

I don’t know how well you remember good old essay writing from your college days, but let’s talk about that for a moment. Back when I was in college, I had to ensure all of my essays and papers adhered to APA formatting. APA guidelines had very stringent requirements for in-text citations and a reference page. At one point, this aspect of writing was the bane of my existence. I hated it with a passion because it took so much time.

In stark contrast, citations in the online world are a breeze compared to my academic days, but the old college writing taught me something important. Authoritative sources are highly desirable to everyone, no matter if the purpose of the content is directed toward academics or business. I also learned that consistency was key. In much the same way, today’s citations for content depend on authority and consistency, which means that although you don’t need to purchase a textbook for the guidelines, there are still basic rules to uphold.

Practice 1: Picking the Right Source(s)

You must ensure that any source you choose to cite meets some basic criteria. Here’s the scoop:

• Relevancy: First and foremost, any source you choose to cite must be relevant. We cannot stress this point enough. If you cite and link to a source simply to build a link or attempt to appear credible, you’ll effectively stab yourself in the back if the source is irrelevant. The right sources will contain information that is relevant to your topic and ultimately be relevant to your business, including your products and/or services.

• Authority: The sources you choose to cite must be authoritative. In all reality, they should be presenting facts and/or statistics that back up the claims you are making.

• Non-Compete: The last thing you want to do is inadvertently point your audience to the competition. Refrain from citing any content that is found on a website offering products or services similar to yours.

Practice 2: Be Picky About Domain Authority

We’re going to let you in on a little secret. Are you ready for this? Domain authority (DA) isn’t easy to build. It takes time, great attention to detail and a hefty collection of highly authoritative content. Not to mention, all of that content needs to be credible. So, how can you tell that you’ve picked the best possible source to cite? One indicator is a website’s DA.

Websites with high DA scores are considered to be more authoritative and credible versus websites with low DA scores. Luckily, there’s a handy, free tool that you can use to see a website’s DA.

It’s called the MozBar. All you have to do is download the browser extension and turn it on. You’ll immediately see the DA of any website you visit or any site that displays on a search engine results page.

Your goal should be to link to websites with a high DA. Websites with 80 and higher DA scores are extremely favorable, but you can realistically shoot for linking to any website that scores higher than 50.

Practice 3: Properly Linking To the Source

There’s a concept you need to understand about citations up front. Casey Meraz makes it bluntly clear in his blog on Moz entitled, Finding and Building Citations Like an Agency. To paraphrase his point, he says that citations aren’t about chasing links. In fact, they are about properly linking to a source that backs up the claims you are making or supports your topic through facts, statistics, a case study, and so forth.

Properly linking to a source is as simple as linking to the page you’re pulling the information from. It’s exactly what you’ve seen us do in our above links to ‘Moz,’ ‘MozBar’ and ‘Forbes.’ You will have some play in how you build your citations when introducing the source, but incorporating the link in text that either identifies the source or indicates what is being talked about is a must.

Practice 4: Properly Linking To the Author

It’s easy to build citations that link to the source, like in the previous best practice point where we link to content to Moz by building the link into the anchor text, “Moz.” However, it’s important to remember that variety is the spice of life. We don’t need to always link to just the source we’re citing. We can highlight the author behind the material and link to him or her also.

Linking to an author is a great way of networking. It’s also a pretty amazing way to increase your chances of getting noticed and maybe earning a link back to your website. So how do you properly link to an author? We demonstrated it for you in the previous best practice point because showing is better than telling. Here’s the quick review: We referenced the author by stating, “Casey Meraz makes it bluntly clear…” and we linked Meraz’s name to his Twitter account.

Practice 5: Keep Your Anchor Text Relevant

It is imperative that your anchor text be relevant to what you’re linking to! We cannot stress this best practice enough. The reader (and ultimately Google) needs to see the relevancy of your citations; otherwise, they are pointless. We recently published a blog about keyword rich anchor text, in which we discuss just what keyword anchor texts are and how they are used. You should definitely swing over and review the post because it’s a great starting point for keeping your anchor text relevant.

Practice 6: Only Link to a Source Once

You can cite a source numerous times in the same piece of content, but you only want to link to that source once. Duplicate links aren’t a good idea, and they don’t send out a positive SEO signal. Think of duplicate links as duplicate content: Unfavorable and potentially harmful.

The best practice when linking to a source is to create the link in your very first citation. Throughout the rest of the content, simply reference back to it by saying things like:

• According to [insert source]…

• [Insert source] also states that…

• [Insert source] goes on to show that…

Practice 7: Change How You Link Throughout the Content

You can link the name of every source throughout your content, but it gets kind of boring. Not to mention, simply linking to that name may not effectively display the relevancy of the content to yours. It’s recommended to change how you link throughout your content.

For example, if your first citations read, “According to Forbes…” and you build the link into the anchor text “Forbes,” try rotating to more of a descriptive text anchor in your next citation. Your next linked citation could be anchor text along the lines of “in a 2014 study.” You can also see an example of our changing over to more descriptive anchor text in best practice point number five.

Practice 8: Always Cite and Link When Using a Direct Quote

A fine line exists between a properly cited quote and plagiarism. It’s perfectly OK to include direct quotes in your content. In fact, it can be a great way to drive home a point. But you have to approach direct quotes with care. If they are not properly credited (i.e. cited), they can quickly land you on the plagiarism offender’s list.

The best practice for direct quotes is to link directly to the source of the quote either immediately before or after the quote itself. The anchor text that houses the link should be either the name of the individual or the business you are quoting. Be sure you know the exact source when using a direct quote. If there’s any question, it’s probably best to alter or paraphrase the quote versus creating a credit that could be incorrect.

Practice 9: Don’t Forget To Link Internally

It’s easy to get so caught up in linking to external sources that you don’t bother to create any internal links. Don’t make this mistake. You should always try to link internally, whether it’s to a previous blog or piece of content that is relevant to the topic being discussed, or to your own product or service. The key to creating a strong internal link is relevancy.

Practice 10: Don’t Overdo It

The final best practice is a word of caution. Citations are truly powerful tools for building credibility, increasing your domain authority and boosting your SEO. But it is vital that you don’t overdo it. Too many links and too many citations can be a bad thing.

As a general rule of thumb, you should try to limit citations per piece of content to five to seven, including your own internal links. Your internal links per piece should really only amount to one or two as this is all that is needed. Citations are about balance. You need to back up your claims, but you shouldn’t create content that is stuffed with citations and links. Think of it like keyword stuff, it’s a dead and ultimately artificial SEO tactic that won’t result in any positive attention from Google.

Why You Simply Cannot Ignore Citations

If you haven’t yet delved into citation creation, you might be sitting in front of your computer or reading this blog on your mobile device and thinking, But why should I try to understand these best practices for using citations in my content? Why are citations so good?

For starters, citations are a means of building strong search engine optimization. They accomplish two important things at once:

• They build your credibility and authority by showing your audience you back your claims with sources outside of your company.

• They beef up your link profile, which is taken into consideration by Google when ranking your website. In other words, the more outbound links you create to high authority sources holding relevant information that back up your claims, the stronger your SEO.

If these two reasons aren’t enough, there are more. According for Forbes, anytime another website or company references or mentions your business on their website, they’re putting the spotlight on you. It’s exposure, and it’s FREE. What’s not to love?

Recruiting Some Help

It’s OK if incorporating citations into your content throws you for a loop. To be honest, the citation formatting I had to do back in college threw me for one! It was a steep learning curve, but gaining a basic understanding of proper academic citations proved to be helpful in my copywriting career. Likewise, learning the best practices of incorporating citations into your online content will be beneficial as you work to improve your content and SEO.

Don’t be afraid of enlisting the assistance of a qualified copywriting team. They can take the headache out of finding and creating those vital citations. And they can even teach you a thing or two in an effort to keep you on the ball when it comes to your content.

Stories are powerful, aren’t they? They unite us, give us hope and teach us things we may not have known before.

But did you know that stories have another awesome purpose? What is it, you ask?

Stories, when involving your brand and business, can create powerful, successful content.

Wait, really? Yes! And I want to show you just how being personal and sharing your story will be the amazing key to successful content you’ve been looking for all these months and years.

Why do People Want Something More Personal?

In our overly cluttered world with ads on every street corner both literal and digital, it can be overwhelming and many consumers get burned out quickly. People don’t just want to see what they like and are interested in, they also want to see authentic, personal content. It helps set businesses apart and can convince a consumer to use that business.

Being authentic is incredibly vital to your marketing strategy, and the way to bring about authenticity is to be personal.

Yes, pay attention to your analytics but don’t write solely for them – write for people. How can you do this?

By writing your story.

5 Incredible Ways Your Story Can Create Successful Content

I know; you’re sitting there wondering what the heck I mean by your story providing successful content. Don’t worry – I fully plan on telling you just how this can happen.

Let’s take a look!

1. It Provides Authenticity, Which is Vital to Marketing Now. When you tell your story, you give yourself the chance to be authentic in your content.

Remember how I mentioned this earlier?

Authenticity is vital to marketing now and in fact, many millennials, according to Laura Brown from Social Media Today, won’t use a business that isn’t authentic. The millennial generation is a large one, and they aren’t the only generation that wants authenticity.

Don’t spend your entire marketing time regurgitating or copying off of others. Yes, you can get great inspiration from others, but adding your own personal voice, story, and perspective really adds a great, authentic touch.

2. Being Personal Gives a Realistic Touch to All Content. When you take the chance to be personal and share your individual story, you are adding an awesome realistic touch to your content.

Empathizing with your client base can be great as long as you’ve actually gone through what they have. If you haven’t, going for an empathetic marketing approach could prove problematic, as Danny Brown points out.

However, when you approach marketing with a realistic approach and give people realism in marketing, they will eat that up. Get that realistic element by telling your story, not the perceived story you have of your customers.

They will be more likely to listen and work with you if you are real about yourself, and they will eventually be real with you. What a great thing!

3. People Like to Know Information About a Business. People love information and they like sharing it with their friends who love it just as much. What kind of information do people like?

Well, anything that can make them look and feel smart.

However, they also like to learn information about a business. Do you have an exciting story about how your business was formed? Then share it.

“What if the business just happened – nothing exciting?” People still want to know about it. Share any story you have of your business – when it was founded or something great that happened – and people will greatly enjoy it.

4. Creating a “Personal Brand” Online Can Increase Traffic. You have your business channels and blog, but what about a personal brand? Have you set yourself apart from your business to provide more personal content?

If not, creating a “personal brand” is definitely something you should consider.

Why?

Because, according to Neil Patel, it can help increase traffic to your site.

How should you go about setting up a personal brand? Well, the first thing is to create your own Twitter account that you use for business-related content. (You can also have your own, truly personal one to post your truly personal things like cat photos.)

You can also make sure that your business blogs are listed under your name, not the business name, helping to set up a unique voice for your business. And, when you go to tell your story, this will help make it more personal and something people will really enjoy.

5. Being More Personal Can Strengthen Your Brand. As you get more personal and share more stories with clients, you might just see your brand beginning to strengthen. Why? Because becoming more personal can really help people begin to trust you.

As people start to trust you, they are more than willing to share your content, engage with you, and purchase products or services. The more this happens, the stronger your brand will get.

4 Excellent Ways to Get Personal in Your Content Without Overdoing It

Whew – now you know a bit about just how getting personal can definitely help your site. But, how much is too much? When should you step back to avoid overdoing it?

Here are a few great suggestions.

1.Make Sure You Focus On Authentic Stories to Bring Customers In. When you write your story, make sure you write it authentically. This will help your readers connect with it more and make them more likely to share it with others.

Just how can you make sure your story is an authentic one?

Carol Barash from Content Marketing Institute says that there are 4 different things that go into an authentic story including:

• Looking for or remembering a particular moment.
• Always writing the story in your own voice, since that will add authenticity.
• Keeping your story going with a great flow.
• Making the reader feel like he or she is part of your story by not setting up walls through words.

2. Have a “Personal” Business Social Media Profile. Now, you know that telling your story is a great way to get personal, and you know that having a personal brand can really add to that.

When you start going for a more personal kick to your content, you need to make sure that your personal business social media profiles are strictly for business. If you treat it just like a profile your friends would follow, you’ll come dangerously close to over-sharing.

On this channel, you can tell more of your business story and get it out to a wide audience. It also gives you the chance to share the blogs you’ve written for your business on a more “personal” level.

3. Interact With Your Clients After Posting Your Story. Your story isn’t going to have that much of an impact if you don’t interact with your readers after posting it. Interacting and engaging with your clients is a great way to drive overall social media engagement.

In addition, it can really help create more of a friendship and relationship with your client base. Focus on maintaining that relationship after your stories have gone live, and your content will be even more successful.

People really do love interaction with businesses, and if they are interacting directly with a person, they will really enjoy that, as well.

4. Maintain a Focus for Your Stories and Personal Brand. Yes, your stories can be about broader topics, but you need to make sure you stay focused on a niche to keep things organized.

Figure out the area you want to share with your clients, and maintain that throughout your stories and on your “personal” business social media profiles. Keeping up consistency is a great way to encourage more people to follow you, share your content, and engage with you.

This will help you make sure you write expert, authentic stories that can work towards personalizing your brand while also giving out excellent information.

Remember, when you write your stories, you can use that as an excellent teaching opportunity for your audience. You don’t need to have things laid out all professionally either. Make sure to add sub-headers, but you will find that being a bit informal will go a long way for your stories.

Sit Down, and Tell Us a Story

Stories are an epic way to create excellent, authentic content that your clients are sure to love and share with their friends. As you work to have a great, personal connection with clients, make sure you are always producing quality content that they, and you, will be proud of.

When it comes to telling your story, Express Writers has an awesome team of writers that can help give your story an awesome feel and voice, no matter what.

SEO Violations That Can Kill Your Rankings. Below reason for seo Violations

Keyword Stuffing

Have you ever heard that too much of a good thing can be bad for you? Well, this certainly applies to SEO keywords! Don’t be too greedy. Previously, people used keyword stuffing as a way to rank their page for multiple keywords in search engines. Fortunately, Google is smarter now – they’ve updated their spam algorithm to drop rankings for pages that keyword stuff.

Low-Quality Content

Having low-quality content on your site can damage your SEO because Google and other search engines are looking for pages with relevant information. If you duplicate content from another site or web page or post thin content, it’s not considered as valuable to searchers!

Neglecting Social Media

Social media is more powerful than many people realize; some business owners don’t take it seriously because they think of teens and meaningless posts. Contrary to popular belief, social network sites can generate a lot of business for your organization! While social signals are not currently a factor in ranking websites, content that is posted to social channels tends to have an edge in search rankings.

If you’re in the process of beginning content creation efforts for your website or blog, it’s likely you have a lot of questions about how to get started.

While “content” is a huge buzzword right now, the process of how to get content is a little foggy. Some feel like content just appears on the Web and few people fully understand what goes into content creation. This is understandable — the process can be mysterious for people who have never dabbled in it before.

Here’s what you need to know:

Why Create Content?

To spearhead a good content creation program, you first need to understand why content is so important. Right now, 27 million pieces of content are shared across the Web on a daily basis. This content ranges from text-based content like articles and tutorials to video content and photo content. What’s more, about 87 percent of B2B marketers are using content marketing in their organizations and a whopping 70 percent of them are putting out more content than they did last year.

Content is a huge tool for businesses. When content is valuable, useful, actionable, and interesting to readers, it gains social shares and draws more people to your company. This, in turn, helps you expand your reach on the Web and earn more leads.

Everyone is using content marketing right now and companies that aren’t prepared to create and distribute high-quality content are missing out on a huge amount of traffic and success. Consider the following:

• 82 percent of customers feel closer to a company after reading the company’s original content;
• 90 percent of customers believe that custom content is useful in making purchasing decisions;
• 60 percent of customers will likely buy from a company that writes useful content;
• 60 percent of people will seek a product after they read about it on the Web.

These statistics make it clear that in addition to doing functional things like helping your site rank for SEO, creating high-quality, unique, original content also boosts your business in the eyes of your customers and helps you earn more business. We live in a content-focused world. Today’s consumers don’t want the gimmicky hard-sell tactics of a few decades back – they want valuable, interesting, informational content that helps them make purchasing decisions and learn new things. When you can provide this for them, you set yourself up to be an authority figure in their minds as well as the company to which they’ll turn when they’re ready to make a purchase.

The Content Creation Process: 5 Key Steps

Now that you know why content is so important, it’s time to cover the how of content marketing. Content marketing is a process and nothing happens overnight. Rather, there are several definitive steps and pieces to creating a functional content creation machine. These steps are as follows:

1. Identify your audience

This is huge. If you don’t know who you’re writing to, it’s virtually impossible to write targeted content. Companies that create effective blog content, commercials, or podcasts know exactly who their target market is and what those people care about and can thus deliver targeted, quality content that their customers find interesting, engaging and exciting.

That said, the first step in your content creation efforts is to define your target audience. To do this, you’ll need to sit down with a piece of paper (or use an online template, if you prefer) and think about your audience. Who are they? Where do they live? How old are they? How much money do they make? What do they care about (social, cultural, environmental, financial, or personal issues)? What problems are they facing? For an example, consider these examples from HubSpot.

Once you’ve answered these questions, the next step is to find out where your target audience hangs out. Do they read blogs? If so, when and how often? Maybe they prefer Facebook or Twitter. Maybe they love podcasts. No matter what their unique preferences are, you need to know these things about them to tailor your content strategy to them (more on this later). Search Engine Journal offers an awesome tutorial for this process that should be very helpful to green or first-time content creators.

Combine all of these answers into one specific marketing persona. Give him or her a name and a photo if it helps make the person feel more real. You can create additional buyer personas as needed, but for now, you can focus on writing all of your content for that one person. Doing this will help ensure your content is targeted, useful and interesting to your customers.

2. Set your goals

You know who you’re writing for, now let’s talk about why you’re writing for them. Is the purpose of your web content to drive sales? Is it to earn leads or drive social shares? No matter what your content marketing goals are, defining them in clear terms will help you target your content more effectively. According to MarketingProfs, the basic content marketing goals are as follows:

• Awareness
• Engagement
• Business Value

It’s possible that your content falls into one of those categories or all three. In any event, though, you need to determine what you want your content to achieve before you start creating it.

3. Determine how you’ll share content

Once you’ve decided whom you’re writing for and why, it’s time to consider how you’re going to get your content to them. Web content is a varied discipline and you have the option of blogging, sharing content on social media, participating in forums and question sites like Quora, or posting content on your website. No matter what you choose, it’s worth noting that nothing today stands alone. If you run a blog, you’ll also need to build and maintain a few social media profiles.

While this is often an intimidating prospect for new content creators, it’s not that difficult. Think of it this way: you need one platform to “house” all of your content (generally a blog, although it could be a website as well) and another few places to help it get noticed (social media, etc.) As a general rule, most content creators recommend starting with two social media platforms of your choice, building your profiles there, and then moving out to other platforms as you master the first ones. Doing this allows you to connect efficiently with your audience and stay organized while also keeping you from feeling overwhelmed.

4. Think about SEO

SEO is the pillar that holds all great content up. Without SEO, it’s virtually impossible for readers to find your content, which makes even the best content useless. Fortunately, there’s a way around that pitfall. SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, refers to the process by which you optimize your content to make it more readable for humans and search engines alike.

When you optimize your content for SEO, you add immense value to it immediately. According to Search Engine Land, there are a few different factors to SEO.

• Content Quality: Content quality is measured by how valuable your content is. Regardless of whether it’s sales content or informational content, it needs to be unique and useful.
• Content Research: Content research is a huge thing. While it’s important that content is factually accurate, we’re talking more specifically about keyword research here. Keyword research allows you to target specific keywords and phrases to help your content appear more prominently in search engine results pages (SERPs). Keyword research is an extensive and important topic and there are plenty of fantastic tutorials to help you explore the concept fully and ensure that you’re finding the best keywords for your site.
• Content Words: Once you’ve determined which keywords you’re going to use you have to distribute them throughout your content effectively. Most experts recommend sticking to a keyword density (the number of times you use your keywords in your content) of about 2.45 percent.  Doing this prevents you from “keyword stuffing” (using keywords excessively and unnaturally throughout your content, a practice which can result in poor SEO rankings) and keeps your content readable for users.
• Content Freshness: Google loves many things, and fresh content is chief among them. Fresh content helps users find and interact with your site and shows Google that you’re active on your website or blog. While you might not be able to update your content on a daily basis right now, you can shoot to update it several times a week.

By being well-versed in these SEO factors, you can create better content and ensure that everything you write is catering to the needs of readers and search engines alike.

5. Write!

As with many things, content creation works best when you jump in. You need to have an idea of where you’re going and how you’ll get there (your target audience and content distribution platforms) but once you’ve got that down, the next step is to begin creating content. Doing this achieves several purposes: First of all, it allows you to start getting an idea for what your readers like and don’t like. Secondly, every page you write is a new page for Google to index, which can provide you with a SEO boost from the get-go. Finally, writing content is a great way to start attracting readers, even if you’re not batting 1,000 just yet.

If you’re having a hard time determining what you should write about, there are a few places you can turn. One great resource is Quora, which we mentioned a little earlier. Quora is a question-and-answer site that is a great place to mine for content ideas. Simply pick a thread that interests you or aligns with your industry and check out the upvoted questions and answers. Doing this can be a great way to figure out interesting content topics as well as to further your understanding about what’s going on in your industry.

Making Your Content Even Better: 3 Tips and Tricks

Now that you know the basic structure of content creation, let’s talk about what you can do to make your content even better. Content creation is a process and, as you begin to establish yourself within your industry, you’ll find that there are certain tools and tricks you can use to make your content creation easier and more efficient.

1. Seasonal Content Audits 

A content audit is a little bit like spring cleaning: you go through your content to determine what’s working, what’s not, what’s old, what’s irrelevant and what needs an update or correction. Doing this can strengthen your site hugely and help you make the most of the content you have. By getting rid of old, outdated, inaccurate, or unpopular content and replacing it with relevant, updated, current, interesting or valuable content, you can ensure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck, so to speak, and truly providing your readers with valuable information.

Doing a content audit is intimidating if you have never done one before, but rest assured that it’s not as hard as it sounds. Undertake this important step a few times a year to ensure that your content is every bit as good as it should be.

2. Editorial calendars

Editorial calendars are believed by many to be the holy grail of content creation. If you’re a new blogger, an editorial calendar can help keep you organized and ensure that you meet your content goals. If you’re an experienced blogger, an editorial calendar is a great tool to have. For those who don’t know, an editorial calendar is a planning document that helps you plan and execute your content. Specifically, it does the following things:

• Allows marketers to brainstorm and generate ideas for posts;
• Allows an organized platform for delegation of responsibilities related to content;
• Helps marketers create and stick to a publishing schedule, which is one of the most important components in building and maintaining a Web presence;
• Allows marketers to have a bird’s eye view of marketing strategies ;
• Acts as a platform for communication and collaboration in larger teams.

Content creation isn’t something you can just improvise – at least not for very long. It requires strategy, planning, intentional direction and consistency, and an editorial calendar is a perfect platform for putting all of these things in place. Companies like CoSchedule offer free content marketing editorial calendar templates that are a great place to get started.

3. Tools of the trade

Did you know that there are several tools you can use to help your content marketing efforts be more effective? One of my personal favorites is SEMrush.

SEMrush is a digital marketing platform that allows you to produce analytics reports, display advertising, conduct research, learn about effective video marketing, discover top industry leaders, find out what the most shared content in your industry has been, estimate the ranking difficult for a given keyword, track your position, group keywords, and manage social media. It’s an exhaustive list, but it’s one of the best services we know.

Using tools like SEMrush not only catapults your content creation efforts to the professional level but it also gives you a real edge over your competition. By learning all you can learn about what’s working and what isn’t in your content creation, you can ensure that you create the best possible content every time you sit down to write.

Conclusion

Content creation: taken alone, it sounds like an impenetrable wall of confusing steps. Fortunately, it’s not nearly as tough as it sounds. By taking the entire process step-by-step and focusing on doing each thing well, you can get your content creation efforts off to a great start, regardless of whether you’re a seasoned writer or you’re starting your first website today.

Content creation doesn’t have to be the domain of high-level experts only and, with a little effort and a good deal of learning, it will not be hard to position yourself to succeed at content both now and in the future.