Getting
Keyword-rich Content for Your Website
by: John Case
A crucial part of getting your
web site noticed by the search engines
is having lots of fresh keyword-rich
text content on your site. Fortunately,
there are many efficient and affordable
ways to add new content to your
site. Here are just a few of them.
Hire a Ghostwriter
Hiring a ghostwriter to produce
text content for your site will
obviously incur costs that you won't
have with free articles. However,
with a paid ghostwriter, you can
expect a higher level of quality
in the writing, and also specify
which keywords you would like to
appear in an article. By publishing
free articles on your site, you
will be adding content that appears
on dozens of other websites. With
a ghostwriter, however, you can
be sure that the content will be
unique to your site, which something
else search engines consider when
ranking a site. Ghostwriters can
be found by registering at www.elance.com
or www.directfreelance.com and posting
a simple project outline. Writers
will bid on your project, and you
accept the writer with the qualifications
and bid that best suits you. If
you go to the trouble of hiring
a ghostwriter, it is probably a
good idea to get them to research
and write a number of articles,
rather than just one.
Keep a Blog
If you maintain a blog to give
your site visitors news and information
about updates to your site, it is
important that you publish your
blog on the same server as your
site. Blogger.com is a free blogging
service that allows you to host
your blog on your site rather easily.
You simply need to go through the
“Advanced” set up when
creating your blog and enter the
ftp information for your site's
server. If you already maintain
a blog that is NOT hosted on your
own site, you are wasting a valuable
resource for SEO, as search engines
do not recognize that keyword-rich
content as part of your site. You
should check the help section of
your blogging service to learn how
to republish it as part of your
site.
As with an article archive, it
is important to link to your blog
from the main page of your site,
or at least from one of the upper
level pages, so search engines can
easily find and spider your blog.
Many webmasters don't maintain
a blog, simply because they do not
know what to include in them. If
you start an article archive as
suggested above, you can use your
blog to announce new articles. Rather
then making a short post such as
“go check out the new articles
in our archive,” include the
article titles and the first line
or two of text of each article with
“read more…” or
“continued…” linking
to the full text in the article
section. These is a simple trick
for getting some of your keywords
to appear in two place on your site.
Create a Forum on Your
Site
A forum or bulletin board on your
site will appeal to both search
engines and human users. Search
engines like forums because they
are constantly being updated with
fresh content. Human visitors will
often return to sites with forums
to ask questions, seek or give advice,
or to make contact with other people
with similar interests. As with
keeping a blog, it is possible to
maintain a forum either off or on
your site's server, and it is very
important that it appears on your
server, with links to and from your
main page. Again, this is so important
as this is the only way that search
engines can recognize all of that
content as part of your site. Setting
up a forum does require some technical
skill, but it is not as difficult
as you might think. PhpBB () offers
free forum software with templates
and set-up tutorials.
If you would like to add a forum
to your site, but lack the technical
skills, you can easily outsource
the work through www.elance.com.