ITC 298: Quality Content Brings Organic Search Traffic

Assignment 2: Quality Content Brings Organic Search Traffic

Scott Golembierwski
www.searchenginejournal.com/quality-content-brings-organic-search-traffic/29156/

One of the most effective ways to ensure your blog's success is to create remarkable content, the most critical element in attracting new visitors and owning your niche.... I think remarkable is what stands alone, like an island that has every resource you’d need to survive 100 years.... Make your blog like the island, a tropical one.

My blogs and magazines are all about content - stories and photographs. The writing is great and varied, the articles are amusing and interesting. They don't fit much of a niche market outside of recreational reading, so I'm finding is tricky to apply SEO successfully. So this opening statement encouraged me.

Author says to use lots of photos and make people feel welcome on the main page. People grade websites in a matter of seconds. Content farms (which is what we don't want to be) look alike and make the reader slog through ads and spiels.

How to SEO those babies without alienating the reader and making them dread loading your page? I'm thinking about how little I now go to Salon.com since it changed editorial hands and started using popups you have to chase down in order to get rid of. I used to be a regular reader, nearly every day. Now the focus in on ads and guest bloggers who are often worth reading and sometimes so bad that I have to remember that if they're in Salon they're not necessarily a professional writer with anything to say.

A scanner zeroes in on links, bold text, h2 and h3s. Make things stand out.

(This is a strangely written article referring to things he hasn't made clear. I'll try to summarize. Okay, I can't. He talks about four points of flow or navigation, detectability, speed of scanning, the skill the reader perceives the site has, and realtime or current content.)

He claims with those four things (if my interpretation is correct) he can SEO the heck out of your topnotch organic content, Here's what he thinks organic content is NOT about: Advertising that pops up or obstructs or otherwise slows the reader down for scanning or focusing on the content he came for. Slow advertising can blow a first impression.

You can keep your visitors by knowing what they want. They've told you already, in the keyword terms they used. Expand your site based on these search queries. Treat every search query like a question, then predict the next questions that will follow and link to pages that answer those.

This would work for Get Lost Magazine and This Offbeat Life.

Don't ask the reader to subscribe or buy something until after they've had a chance to hang around a while. You will own your niche because you will have built their confidence and trust by giving your helpful content first.