10 Tips to Create Awesome Content that Is Easily Discovered

There are so many wonderful things about the digital age in which we live, and we’re lucky to have an ever-growing abundance of information at our fingertips.

The job of sharing news and valuable information no longer resides solely with professional journalists; more and more self-promoted bloggers are taking to the web-a-verse to share their opinions and insights.

Power to the people! While this shift of power away from traditional media outlets opens a lot of doors for bloggers, it has also resulted in a glut of online content. That’s a problem if you are trying to get your content noticed. But there are things you can do to make sure your content gets the attention it deserves.

Here are nine tips to get your content to stand out from the crowd:

1. Keep Your Ideal Audience in Mind – Always create great content with your ideal customers in mind—will this information be valuable to them? If not, how can you craft the information so that it will interest them? If you use personas in your marketing efforts, consider the various personas, their individual interests, and unique needs.
2. Opt Out of Updating Old Content; Make New Posts Instead – If you’re blogging about a developing story or continuing topic, create a new post rather than updating the old page. You can create a series of blog posts with a specific theme, like we have with our PPC Experts Interview Series or the Google AdWords Ad Extension blog posts. Link between the old and new pages for easy navigation.
3. Use Online Data to Discover Trends – Twitter provides great real-time data about what topics are trending and what people are buzzing about, and Google Trends gives insight into the hot button topics people are searching for. Creating content with this online data in mind will keep you in the loop and allows you to optimize your content for those trending search terms.
4. Pay Attention to URL Structure and Title Tag – Including the keywords you want to rank for in your URL and title adds a nice SEO boost.
5. Evaluate your Top Content – PPC experts know how important it is to continuously test and track an ad’s success (or lack of). Testing allows you to discover what is and what is not working in your advertisements. Evaluating your top content is the same idea. Examine your top-ranking pieces and try to see why those posts did so well. Did you include several images? Was it a timely news piece? Did you include a great offer?
6. Make it Easy to Share –Imbed Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ buttons on your content pages so that visitors can easily share them via social networks. We’re all far too busy and/or lazy to copy and paste.
7. Use Dynamic Content and Internal Links – Increasing on-site discovery is important in boosting page views and time on site. You can suggest relevant topics to visitors through the use of dynamic content (most shared topics, most viewed topics, etc.). Internal links and relevant anchor text also make it easy for your visitors to discover additional content and navigate seamlessly throughout your site.
8. Insert Long-tail Keywords – Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases made up of three of more words. Long-tail keywords are easier to rank on than head terms (one or two word phrases) because they are more specific. Inserting long-tail keywords into your content is a handy technique for driving targeted, relevant traffic.
9. Don’t Skimp on the Media—Inserting media like images and video into your content can help you rank higher in the SERPs. You can use an image’s alt text to insert SEO keywords, but even more valuable is that many search engines, including Google, show multi-format results at the top of their SERP pages. People also love to share and “like” videos.
10. Use an Editorial Calendar—Capturing everything in one place makes it easy for you to streamline your content creation process, from ideation to publication to promotion and more!

Implement some of these tips and see how it affects your content’s ranking. As always, content is king—your pieces won’t ever get too much attention if they don’t offer valuable information that interests people. However, when you’re creating great content that just doesn’t seem to rank, these tips might be just the boost you need to get your content noticed.