If you spend any time at all with the Cement Marketing team, you quickly learn that we are obsessed with creating awesome content. Our mantra has always been–humans first, search engines second.

Why?

Because without content that engages an audience–the beautiful websites we create won’t attract any quality visitors. Even if we buy visitors through our pay-per-click campaigns, when those visitors arrive the content still needs to answer their anticipated need. Answering those needs lead to more conversions or goal completions. In the case illustrated here from a client Google account, these goal completions are contact form leads.

Google, as it turns out, completely agrees with us.

In a major victory for true content crusaders everywhere, Google has announced a major shift in its algorithm (called the Panda update) that penalizes content farms or, as we call them, SEO Spammers. According to Google, the new algorithm is “designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites.”

If you would like to see an example of a low-quality, content farm or SEO Spam site – click here, here or here. To see examples of quality blog posts that also play to the search engines browse some of our client sites including:

ArenaDistrict.com
Volunteers of America of Greater Ohio
Athens Business Remixed

In some cases, our clients are writing their own content, which is ultimately where you and your company should be. The best content comes directly from the source. To help foster internal content creation, Cement Marketing trains client marketing teams and also writes blog editorial calendars to keep them on task.

Steps that will help you and our team create quality content on your website:

1. Identify your audience.

2. Identify the action you would like your audience to take on your website.

3. Brainstorm creative content that will answer your audiences questions and drive them to an action.

4. Create a blog editorial calendar. Be sure to fill it with entertaining multi-media posts. Think outside of the box. A blog post doesn’t have to be 700 words. It could be 100 words, or even less. For a great example of awesome, short blog content check out the Sharpie blog.

5. Assign blog posts to your team and start creating your content.

6. Remember to inter link your content to itself. This keeps old posts alive and well.

To ensure your SEO bases are covered filter in your keywords throughout your creative content. Start with the humans and then add in the search engines. So, write a post for your audience and then go back in with your keyword research and filter those words throughout that blog post. If you’re curious about keyword research, watch this Cement Marketing video on how to use the Google Keyword Tool.

If your site is in need of vital content juice that will help it rank better, contact us. Also please ask any questions about the new algorithm in the comments.