Editor’s Note: Below is guest blog post contribution. ProspectMX isn’t opposed to accepting guest blog posts, FYI. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, email info@prospectmx.com and one of our team members will get in touch with you to discuss the details. Happy reading!

Recent and relevant content breathes new life into a website and increases the chances of being found by search engines. While a blog is a particularly common way of attracting customers to your website, there are plenty of other ways beyond your blog to improve your search engine ranking, to provide important information, and to generate new leads and customers. Here are five ways you can update your website with new content:

Create a News or Media Section on Your Website

Every business creates reports, press releases, award information, and event information that can easily be posted in a news or media section on a website.

Pamela Seiple of HubSpot suggests making your company’s contact information easy to find on your news page and then carefully selecting what you share on your news page in order to avoid cluttering it. She writes, “if you’d like to showcase your award wins or a list of the media coverage you’ve generated, you might provide a snapshot of highlights in your newsroom but also link to separate pages you’ve built to house more detailed information.”

Create a Resource Center for Long Form Content

Whether you merge your blog posts into E-books or create tutorials for your customers, a resource center or product information page can be a powerful tool for attracting customer interest and generating more leads, especially if you add a sign up form that customers must fill out before downloading your resources. Provided you keep the sign up process free and simple, you could both draw in new leads and increase the relevance of your website for customers.

Corey Eridon of Hubspot suggests, “Simply draft an abstract or select a poignant excerpt from the content to publish as a sort of preview. Then, direct the visitor to the landing page where the content can be redeemed.”

If necessary, you may also want to create another section about your products that addresses specific questions that new customers may have. This is different from a resource center that covers the needs of existing customers.

Write Original Product Details on Your Website

Unique product details aren’t just important for targeting your customers. They can also help your search ranking. Armando Roggio writes for Practical eCommerce, “Compelling, informative, and unique product descriptions can help your ecommerce business increase sales. Moreover, original product descriptions can help avoid Google’s so-called ‘Farmer algorithm’ penalty, which can affect retailers that copy product descriptions from competitors, or that use the exact descriptions suggested by suppliers.”

Unique product copy can be especially helpful in your SEO plans. Corey Eridon at HubSpot suggests, “Take advantage of this space to write unique, keyword-optimized content that describes the product, compels readers to take action, and helps you rank for important search terms.”

A Website’s Learning Center

A learning center is a place where you can share your own videos, slide shows, or customer videos demonstrating how to use your company’s products or demonstrating the way you work with customers. Content such as podcasts, webinars, and learning videos all should be easy to find on an organized page.

For example, domain registration service Register.com has a fairly extensive Learning Center that covers topics that are important for customers who own websites. If you create content for your customers or for SEO, don’t let it go to waste in a place where customers can’t easily find it.

Reviews, Testimonials and Case Studies for Your Website

Reviews are an essential source of information for customers. A recent Search Engine Land survey reported the following results: “Approximately 72% of consumers surveyed said that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, while 52% said that positive online reviews make them more likely to use a local business.”

Collect reviews and testimonials on your website and make them easy to find by including links on your home page, media center, about page, and especially on product pages. Don’t let distributors and search engines own all of your product reviews. You can even add incentives to draw customers to your website to leave reviews.

Content creation requires learning how to both reuse and organize what you’re already creating. Sometimes you may need to write original content, such as new product descriptions or press releases, but every new press release, learning article, or video you upload to your website provides stronger SEO optimization and ties with your customers. The payoff for writing fresh content for your website can be huge.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that offers a to do list app for businesses and individuals, and who also consults for a customize neon sign store that provides various neon signs.

One of my biggest struggles as a writer is keeping my copy concise and to the point. I am the queen of long winded copy, because it allows me to let loose my thoughts, opinions and knowledge. But I realize that just because I find my “flow of consciousness” style interesting, doesn’t mean my audience does.

So the last time I wrote copy for a website I made it a point to be as concise and to the point as possible. And you know what? That stuff STILL came out longer than I wanted! So I’ve come to the conclusion that I suck at concise copy, and it’s something I need to work on.

The Web Copy Light at the End of the Tunnel

Then I came across a guest post on Graywolf’s SEO blog about how much you should be willing to pay for good copy. The post is a great read (nice job Malcolm!) and it opened my eyes to things that have been in the back of my mind, but I never wound up giving voice to.

People love to preach about “short” copy on the web, because people only read 18 words out of a 100 and you only have so many words to catch their interest, blah, blah blah…but the bottom-line is that if your writing is compelling and your tone engaging, then there’s a good chance you’ll keep the reader’s interest and get them to read exactly what you want.  In other words – your web copy can be as long as it needs to be!

The Littlest Tweak Can Make a Huge Difference

In reading that post, which was full of linky goodness, I clicked through to read Dustin Curtis’s “You Should Follow Me on Twitter.” It’s basically a case study on how just a few tweaks to a very short sentence increased his clickthrough rate by over 170%.

Literally, by changing the call to action at the end of his posts from “I’m on Twitter” to “You should follow me on twitter here.” he saw a 173% increase in clickthroughs to his account.

It’s amazing to me the power a few words can have…. He took a rather static, dull statement, added some persuasive force and voila! A veritable flood of clicks!

Writing Web Copy that Achieves Your Goals

There’s no right or wrong answer to writing copy on the web (IMO)…it’s all about who you’re writing for and what your overall goal is – what do you want those people to do. That’s what should determine how you write your copy.

For example, when I think of the 3 main types of web writing I do, I realize I have a different tone/style for each.

SEO Copy – this is typically for ranking purposes – I’m trying to optimize the copy to rank for as many long tail keywords as possible. My writing tends to be more professional, but can get a bit long because of my method of optimizing content. Of course, I’m ALSO trying to write copy that will help conversions, so there’s a fine balance to writing good SEO copy and making sure it’s persuasive to the reader.

Landing Page Copy - this is usually for PPC campaigns, and so my biggest focus is writing copy that will convert (or sell) visitors – or at least draw a clear and persuasive picture of the path and actions we want them to take on the site. I don’t have to worry about rankings, so this copy tends to be a bit shorter in some cases.

Blogs – there’s pretty much an infinite number of purposes or reasons for blogging. Your style should change depending on your purpose. For example, I tend to write blogs jut to share my opinion – so I kick back and write in my own voice, the same one I used to breeze through my Creative Writing courses in College. Does it work for a blog? I don’t know…but I sure have fun writing it!

I’ll Say It Till I’m Blue In The Face…

Web copy is IMPORTANT! Muy, muy importante! And yet so many people don’t think they should pay top dollar for quality writing. After all…everyone can write, right? Um yeah… I guess that’s why an experienced freelance writer can make over $50 and hour….

As promised, here’s Part 2 of my SEO Content Writing series…check out part one here: SEO Content Writing Part 1.

SEO Content Is Under Appreciated…

Typically, most clients don’t understand just how much SEO content can help their rankings. It’s really all about the terms you want to rank for. SEO’d content helps you rank for more long tail terms. And typically, long tail keywords send more relevant traffic to your website. By relevant I mean people who need what you offer and are more likely to convert to leads, sales, etc.

We’ve seen time and time again how many long tail keywords a site can rank well for just by having the right keywords sprinkled throughout their content.

Of course, I’m in NO way saying that SEO’d content is all you need to rank. There are tons of other factors that go into getting your site ranked for various keywords…SEO content writing is just one aspect of it, but an important one when it comes to long tail rankings.

A Few More Tips For SEO Content

I did promise a few additional tips, didn’t I? To get the first few, go back and read my other post (it’s fairly quick and painless, I promise.)

A few other things to keep in mind when writing content for SEO:

• Use your main keywords in your <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags…and even <h4> if you got ‘em. Google sees this as a headings, and will usually see them first – they hold a bit more emphasis then body text.
• Bold the use of your keywords once or twice through out your copy.
• Include keywords in the file names and alt tags of any images.
• ABOVE ALL: make sure your content is genuinely useful and relevant information – that’s really what Google is looking for!

Cool SEO Content Tools & Resources

When I first started writing optimized content for clients, I used a very cool tool from SEOmoz called Term Target, that would basically give you a letter grade on how well you optimized your content for a chosen keyword. You basically put in the url of your content, enter the keyword you were targeting, and hit the button to run.

Within seconds you get a “grade” and suggestions on how to improve your grade. Once you’ve run this enough times, you basically memorize what your pages should include to get a good grade, but it’s an awesome tool if your still learning the ropes.

As a newbie in the world of web copy (for both SEO and sales/marketing stuff) I lived and breathed CopyBlogger.com. They’ve got a couple great posts about SEO copywriting that really helped me grasp the concept to begin with. While there are other blogs that may have more comprehensive info on the subject, CopyBlogger will always be near and dear to my heart!

Many people don’t realize how important optimizing your content can be for your SEO. While link building with relevant anchor text is one of the major factors, proper on page optimization, including SEO content, is crucial to your organic rankings.

The first question any business owner/CEO/SEO/marketer should ask themselves when entering the wide world of search engine optimization is “what are the best terms my site should rank for and why should I rank?”

In our experience, most people would reply “I want #1 rankings for the keywords that get the most searches because I want tons of site traffic!”

And as an SEO content writer, I would have to humbly disagree. All the traffic in the world isn’t going to help your site if it doesn’t lead to more business.

You see, the key word missing from their reply is “relevant.” What you want are rankings for RELEVANT keywords that send RELEVANT traffic. From there you can actually write RELEVANT SEO content! After all, if you sell Christmas decorations, you’re not going to see much in the way of relevant traffic if you rank #1 for just Christmas or just decorations. People searching those terms individually could be looking for just about anything!

Relevance in SEO Content Writing

Once you understand the importance of relevance, it’s time to gather a list of the MOST relevant keyword searches with the MOST amount of traffic. You should only focus on one keyword silo per page – so for instance, one page would focus on the silo “Christmas decorations” while another could focus on “holiday decorations”.

By keeping these silos on different pages, you can more easily tell the search engines what you think each page should rank for, and plan your content and SEO accordingly.

So using various keyword research tools (I love the Google Adwords Keyword Tool myself, but the Search-Based Tool and Wordtracker tools are good too), you want to collect a list of all keyword terms containing both words “Christmas” and “decorations” and sort by search volume.

Take your top 5-10 most searched terms and voila! You’ve got a list of keywords you want to use in your SEO content.

More to SEO Content Writing Than Meets the Eye

Of course, there’s more to optimizing SEO content then just throwing keywords all over the content. For one, keyword stuffing is definitely a no-no in Google’s eyes, and secondly, it makes content REALLY rough to read. So there’s a balance.

Write enough content (400-600 words is typically ideal) so that you can comfortably use combinations of your top 5 keywords without it looking unnatural or stilted.

There’s certainly some more goodies I can share about writing SEO content, but I think I’ll stop there for now. As you can see, this is only Part 1! Stay tuned for Part 2 in the next couple weeks, and in the meantime, feel free to ask questions and I’ll do my best to answer them in my next post!

SEO Content Writing Recap

1. Conduct keyword research to find relevant keywords to rank for (think about what prospective customers would search for).
2. Pick one keyword silo per page of content (or 2 REALLY closely related ones).
3. Incorporate the top 5 or so most searched for terms in different combinations within your content.
4. Do NOT keyword stuff – 400-600 words should make it easy to naturally tie in 5+ keyword combinations.
5. Come back sometime in January to see my follow up post and learn more about optimizing your SEO content.

If there’s one thing that most designers will tell you is important when designing a page, it’s that all of the important content should be “above the fold.”  It’s a common practice that dates back to when humans read something called “newspapers.”

These archaic gray monstrosities were often printed on thin paper and folded right in the middle.  Therefore, it was standard practice to put the most important content “above the fold.”

The difficult thing about designing above the fold on the internet is… well, we never know exactly where the fold is!  Nevermind the fact that most people use a variety of screen resolutions, ranging from the dreadful 800 x 600 up to the glorious 2560 x 1600. On top of that, people also can have an unknown variable of toolbars.  Currently, I have 3 toolbars on my 1680 x 1050 monitor, cutting out about 85 pixels from the top of my browser.

So what can a designer do?  Typically, the thought is to design a page for the least common denominator, assuming that your average viewer will be looking at your page on their grandmother’s 13in. CRT display.  This means putting all the stuff you deem as important up at the top and all the rest slapped down at the bottom.  The obvious problem to this is that it will look weird on regular monitors.

So what can you do?

First, you can take a look at your site statistics and figure out what percentage of users are looking at your page with various resolutions. If no one is looking at your site at 800 x 600, don’t worry about designing for them!

Second, you can determine which parts you absolutely want above the fold, like a call-to-action form, and place that higher up on the page. Then you don’t have to worry about whether or not you have an H1 and an H2 above the fold.

Third, and most importantly, you can ignore the problem altogether and read this interesting article about whether or not “designing above the fold” is worth the effort. The article comes with heatmaps and actual user testing.

Read this article…it’s worth your time.

I highly suggest reading this article and making your own opinion.  The most important thing that I took away from it is that your site should have enough important, relevant content on the page that makes me actually want to scroll down the page.

Imagine that?  People will scroll down the page if there’s interesting content!

It sounds so simple, but I think it’s a concept that most people forget.  If you have interesting and relevant content on your page – information that people are actually looking for – it won’t be a chore for them to read it.

Then, your content will be digested by more people and visitors to your site will stay longer, improving your bounce rate. That will help the overall ranking of your site.

So as a designer, this is an exciting revelation. Great content makes or breaks a page, not the designer!  Well, I’m off to forward this article to our copywriter.  The burden is all on you from now on, Ashley!  Guess I’m off to lunch now.