It’s pretty obvious at this point that all the quick hacks that were once used to increase your search engine pagerank are long obsolete.   With Google’s eye for sites with high quality content many businesses are faced with the overwhelming responsibility of constantly cranking out new articles, requiring more time, and a much larger investment in the overall process. At this point in the game there’s no turning back, and there’s no avoiding it – either kick ass with appealing content or risk losing your rankings, traffic volume, and ultimately a nice chunk of your customer base.

More recently marketing consultants have been using content outsourcing services to get the job done and attaining pretty favorable results from the technique. Typically the content generated from these outsourcing services isn’t really that great, containing generic coverage of their subject topics at best, while receiving almost no social recognition or circulation. With Google’s new algorithms considering social aspects of web content, the days of increasing your pagerank by purchasing a bag full of articles from an outsourcing service are coming to an end quickly.

The content quality issue arises primarily due to the lack of research/education on the subjects the content authors are covering.  They typically spend a few minutes researching the topic beforehand and firing away at your articles in machine gun procession.  Most readers can easily identify low quality content, and therefore usually have no interest in sharing it with their friends or linking to it from their blogs.

In-House vs. Outsourcing

The most efficient method of generating high quality content for your web presence is to hire a handful of guest bloggers to create the content for you on a daily release schedule.  Having multiple bloggers allows you to push content out every day – and not just a random blog post here and there when you get around to it.

Some weigh the importance of blogging enough to hire an in-house writer to release new blog articles on a daily basis.  This method can be just as rewarding as finding remote guest bloggers, however the costs involved in carrying a writer as an in-house employee can sometimes exceed the costs of paying multiple bloggers to write the articles on their own time. In most cases I’ve found it quite cheaper to have five bloggers write one article per week, than one blogger writing five per week.

When the search engines analyze your content output frequency and sees that you’re constantly publishing socially appealing articles that generate backlinks from quality web sites, your pagerank will soar at the top and stay there.  You will no longer have to worry about one of your black hat tricks becoming obsolete and penalizing (or eliminating) your page rank.

Locating and training your bloggers

As stated above, one of the most important aspects of your sites content authoring is authors education and experience within your specific industry or niche.  Using social media networks like LinkedIn will make it easier for you to locate an affordable blogger that has some experience writing in your field, however you’re still going to need to spend some quality training time with each of the bloggers you recruit to ensure they understand your business model.

It’s also extremely important that you make sure the blogger understands your business model well enough to write authoritive articles about the subjects to be covered. You’ll have to expose a good bit of your business model to them and possibly some of your trade secrets for their content output to make any real impact on the social networks.  Be sure to have them sign non-disclosure/non-compete agreements to protect your trade secrets.

Attacking your competition with targeted keyphrases

While high quality content may be one of the most important factors of your search optimization efforts, making sure your articles are linking to your content appropriately is just as important(read my article covering on-page search optimization techniques if you’re unfamiliar). I find it highly effective to attack a small handful of keywords that generate the best traffic in both volume and quality. Using the Google’s free keyword tool to determine which key phrases generate the most traffic can help you pick the ones that best match your particular product or service.

Once you’ve identified your primary keyword list(try to keep it under 5 keyphrases), distribute this list to your guest bloggers to build links within your articles.  Using only a small handful of keywords within your articles as links will increase your pagerank faster for those specific keyword varations.  This technique is much more effective as opposed to attacking a long list of different keyword variations, as the value of your links (both internally, and externally) will increase at a faster pace as the volume of your content increases.

As a result of practicing the above mentioned techniques your rankings should go through the roof. Existing visitors will keep coming back to read your content, increasing both the authority value in your content, and exposure to your call-to-action components, ultimately resulting in more sales.

Should any of you have any questions about the techniques mentioned in this article, or any other web marketing topics, feel free to shoot me an email! I enjoy getting feedback from my readers and answering any questions they may have.

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