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For any online marketing agency, creating great content for a website is essential to having a solid online presence. Whether this is aimed around brand awareness, SEO, bring in sales, or all of the above; you have to get it right. Creating good quality content is not always straightforward though, especially when you have to write on a topic that isn’t conventionally, let’s say, ‘exciting’.

If your content is truly exceptional, you will come to find that more and more people will be compelled to share it through the likes of social networking websites, webmasters will link to it, and most importantly, you will see your site perform well in the rankings. As attractive as this sounds, it’s not without putting in the effort. In fact, content creation is one of the hardest parts. With the industry ramping up at an incredible rate, you need to ensure that your content is more than just white noise.

Research Your Subject Area

Always be sure to use fresh, relevant, interesting and unique subjects on which to write about. An interesting new piece will undoubtedly attract readers and can also help to increase your returning traffic if you’re able to keep up with the quality content regularly.

Take a look into tools such as Google Insights to see what is trending, as well as looking through social bookmarking website like StumbleUpon and Tumblr. This will give you an idea of other relevant content that has been written. On top of this, you could sign up to related blogs’ RSS feeds and have Google Alerts set up to give you a constant flow of research material to use.

Also, don’t shy away from using a controversial topic as your subject matter, as a controversial topic or opinion can spark reactions, feedback and comments; hence, generating links. However, you must be careful that you use credible sources and you can back up the content with facts or your brand’s reputation may be at risk.

Link to Other Good Content

Once you have carried out your initial research, you should have a wealth of information at your disposal. It is at this point when you should recognise that link-building is very much a two way system. Link to other peoples’ content that you have looked at as this will not only encourage them to link back to you, but it will also help your users find other relevant information.

Find what could be seen as ‘boring’ datasets and turn them into fresh new content that is easily digestible for the end user, link back t the original data and I’m sure that you will find the owner of the data will be more than happy to link to your content.

Bed in Your Keywords Naturally

When it comes to writing your content, the use of the keyword or key phrases that you are targeting to rank well for cannot be emphasised enough. However, you need to remember to refrain from bombarding your content with constant repetition of the keyword, not only to appease the reader, but also to stop search engines from penalising you for keyword stuffing. Gaining a penalty like this could be severely detrimental to your SEO progress, and that is not worth the risk.

One way of using it your keywords effectively is to place them in the title of your content. Try to generate a title to your webpage or blog post based around the keywords themselves. We recently wrote a guide on creating SEO friendly webpage titles that may be worth taking a look at. Also, if you’ve used the exact keyword or key phrase in the title, it’s worth using semantic variations of it in the actual body text itself, not only to avoid spamming, but also to make your content appear more natural.

Structure Your Content

The structure of the content can be as important as the actual content itself. If, when a user is directed to the page, they see huge blocks of text with no other visual cues, it can seem very overwhelming, and I often just click away from these type pages. Mae sure you break up the information well. Use heading effectively, and where you can, use images. Don’t limit your images to just photos; always try to use graphs and other visual representations of data wherever you can to give your content much more credibility and make for an easier read.

Finding the perfect balance between the use of keywords and key phrases, top quality links and the overall conclusion you want to convey will greatly help the quality of your content. Also, the use of lists and bullet points may be more attractive rather than long daunting paragraphs.

Go Against the Current

Initially, finding a fresh topic seems to be incredibly difficult because you’ll come to find that almost everybody is writing about the exact same thing. However, don’t see this as an obstacle. Remember: controversy gains attention, and attention equals traffic. If all the bloggers of the world have all reached a consensus on a certain topic, don’t be afraid to write fresh content on the complete opposite opinion, just to make you stand out.

Follow these tips and it will get you on the road to creating your own top quality content for your websites. If you do have any more questions, please feel free to leave a comment or contact one of the members of our SEO team. Good Luck!