The Governance Partnership > A.O.B.
A.O.B.
Preventing One Hit Wonders
Published: 06 October 2011
For bloggers and business website managers, the quality of the content holds the key to ensuring that first-time visitors become site regular readers and subscribers. Search-engine optimization techniques obviously have their place in online marketing strategies, but they are certainly secondary to the need to create bang-on, eye-catching, mind-engaging content that will wow, impress, inform and, perhaps of greatest significance, engage our audience.
What the experts say
The noted personal finance coach and blogger, J.D. Roth, has more than 250,000 visitors a month to his site. That level of traffic is difficult to achieve and therefore makes J.D. Roth’s opinions on how to achieve such success quite valuable Mr. Roth says:
“Don’t worry about SEO. Search engine optimization does not make a successful blog. Writing content that people want to read makes a successful blog.”
The quality of that post which brought a visitor to our site, combined with the quality of other previous posts, must work together to prevent that post which brought a Google-search visitor to our site from becoming a one-hit wonder. Every post we publish must make significant contributions to our library of thought-provoking or insightful material.
Don’t forget about presentation
Just as the individual content is of concern, so too is the presentation of our posts. Not seeking an aesthetic conversation on what constitutes ‘good’ design, my point is simply to make clear that visitors must find it easy to read the content they seek. Moreover, we need to ensure that the content we wish to highlight (perhaps our most highly trafficked content) is easy to find. We need to encourage visitors to browse our site.
Let’s not forget SEO
At the risk of sounding contradictory, focusing only on the quality of content makes the most sense when publishing content on a specific, detailed topic. For bloggers or businesses that wish to present conversations on a wider array of topics, then strategic use of keywords plays a more significant role. An insight-led SEO strategy can bring notable increases to visitor levels on a website.
Yet, it’s important not to let an emphasis on SEO allow us to ignore the crafting of top quality content. The two must go hand-in-hand or the user-experience on our website will be a one-off.
To conclude, well constructed, clear, concise and thought provoking posts are the key to preventing our entries from becoming one-hit wonders. Combined with a well-designed website and some clever use of SEO techniques, our business blog is bound to draw in repeat and loyal readers.
Liam Dempsey is an Associate of The Governance Partnership