User Friendly Content Marketing

There are essentially two ways websites are being marketed on the internet today, including search engine marketing and content marketing. Both are aimed and drawing attention from search engines and hopefully an increase in traffic. Search engine marketing focuses on the search engine requirements for placement in the search results while content marketing is more focused on the users…the ones who will actually make a purchase from your site.

Search engines are tricky beasts and the criteria for being prominently indexed appears to change frequently to keep some webmasters from taking advantage of their algorithms and finding a top placement in searches for which they have no relevance. Optimizing a web page to please a search engine may enable the page to find a listing higher on the search results but as real humans go to those sites and find nothing of value, they won’t hang around.

Search engines also go back and check their indexing procedures periodically and when they find pages coming up in the ranking that have no bearing on the search terms, will drastically lower their rank, if not delete them completely. Human users are finding that content marketing is the best way that websites can be marketed to help them find useful information for which they are searching.

When a user enters a search time, the search engine looks for sites that pertain to the term and returns results based on set criteria and while of those factors change frequently, two seem to remain at the top of the list. Of primary consideration is whether there is enough quality information, graded by textual content, to make the site appear to meet the search term. The second most commonly used is how popular the site is among other sites with relevant content.

In order to meet these criteria, webmasters are insuring their sites have textual content, repeatedly using keywords about their product or service that web users are most likely to use as search terms. Having content rich content can help lead search engines to a site and subsequently more users will be directed to the site. Using text that contains keywords only may improve the site’s ranking for a few minutes, but the search engines will quickly recognize this ploy and drop the site like a hot rock.

Another methods used by many users will be to create articles relating to their website business and distribute them through an article distribution service. Information in the article must be useful and not self-serving in order for other websites and newsletters to pick them up for publication, usually free of charge. The bonus for the author comes in from a source box included at the end of the article that includes a link back to the author’s website.