It’s been a headache of journalists for decades. When we write something new, be sure to answer five basic questions: Who, what, when, where and why. The same questions you should ask yourself when developing a plan for site content plateau. This guide will give you more confidence to create content that beats the socks to your readers – and differentiates you from your competitors in the industry. We will go through these well-known W is in order.

WHO?

Start your content creation process by thinking about who should write your content. Do you have the internal manpower, or do you need to go outside your company to get the job done? Obviously, your internal writers will already have a good understanding of your particular industry and niche. They’ll also have a direct stake in making sure your company succeeds online. However, if you don’t have a team of internal writers – maybe you’re a small business, or maybe your writers’ energies are already focused elsewhere, consider hiring external writers. This allows your internal team to continue working on their current projects. Another advantage is that you can achieve great results by having professional writers focus their total attention on your web content. Also, these external writers can bring fresh perspectives on generating the best content. For example, they might raise some basic questions that might be shared by potential customers who aren’t that familiar with the inner workings of your industry. Your company can access a wide variety of potential writers by deciding to accept guest blog posts on your blog or website. This will serve as a signal to thousands of otential writers that you’re serious about generating content. You can even have a freelancer write a draft of his article and have your marketing employees edit it to increase its relevance to your particular audience.

Using existing content

Using existing content is a great way to create new content without doing quite as much work. This should be an occasional strategy; it’s not something you should consider for every post.

One method for using existing content is to review old blog posts that received a lot of traffic. Then, discuss that post (include a link to reference it) and add some new points that elaborate on that same subject.

Another existing content strategy involves repurposing others’ content. Take a look at some interesting online articles about your industry and think about what new spin you can put on that specific trend or subject. Obviously, make sure you reference the other content by providing proper citation. Provide maximum value to your website visitors by elaborating on an argument or offering a different way of thinking about it.

WHAT?

Ahh…the question that often confounds writers. What exactly should I write about? When it comes to your company’s website, you need to write about what will interest your customers. You’ll need to use actual data to decide what your audience wants to read. First, open up the lines of communication and ask customers what they’re interested in reading about. Use customer surveys and polls, and include questions in customer emails. Also, create a section on your website that allows customers to write reviews and contact an employee if they encounter a problem. Continue to develop strong customer relationships and pick the brains of long-time clients. Also, find out what customers are talking about off your site. Check out questions on Yahoo! Answers and read forums about your industry. In addition, visit sites of competitors who are doing a good job of engaging customers. It’s also important to gain insight from people in related industries by asking what interests their customers. After collecting all this information, start to plan how you can write content that

addresses these specific issues.

Determine What is Trending

There are many tools in your arsenal when it comes to discovering which topics are trending.

If your customers tend to use Twitter, the social media site can be a great source for learning about trending topics in real time. Trends appear on the right side of the home page of your Twitter feed. Many come in the forms of hashtags (denoted with an #) that basically represent conversations about different topics. Some of the trending topics on a recent Thursday included #this weekend, #google and #iPod. You can set your Trending location to cities across the United States, as well as numerous countries and major international cities.

Other social media sites like Facebook and YouTube can give you great ideas about what people are talking about. Facebook can be viewed as the online version of the proverbial “water cooler”. Find out what the people are repeatedly talking about on your company’s Facebook wall and the walls of other companies in your industry. YouTube allows you to browse videos in many different categories like “News & Politics” and “Science & Technology”. You can also look at the most viewed videos and the most favored videos to get a sense of what topics are generating buzz on the video site. Below is a screenshot of YouTube Trends, which provides loads of information about videos that are going viral on the Internet. To the right is a list of trending topics that you can click. At the top of the page is a link to the Trends Dashboard, which allows you to search trending videos for cities across the United States and numerous other countries. You also can choose one of eight age categories to drill down to specific age ranges.

Social media sites are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to researching

what’s trending. Other sources include Google Alerts, Google Trends, Google

Insights.

Google Trends can be particularly handy. Here, a search for “LivingSocial” shows trending data over the past seven years, as well as links to six news articles from recent months. Below are the top nations, cities and languages for searches on this deal-of-the-day company. You can see that the United States represents the highest regional search volume, followed by Ireland, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Google Insights also provides significant data on a “LivingSocial” search, including the top 10 search terms and rising searches. A global search volume index shows the U.S. search volume as “High” and the search volume in Australia and Canada as “medium”. Google Alerts allows you to set up specialized notifications that alert you when people mention your company in places like blogs, video and discussions. Just provide your email and you can choose between daily, weekly or real-time alerts.

WHEN?

There’s no time for content like the present, as long as it benefits the reader.

You want to keep the content on your website as fresh as possible. That means

publishing blog posts at least several times a week. It also means keeping site visitors informed about new products and trends in your industry on an ongoing basis. Keep yourself updated on trends in your industry so that you can provide insightful commentary. Frequent content updates can help you explain the newest aspects of your products – and what sets them apart from those of competitors.

WHERE?

Your site might be strong from an architectural standpoint, but you still need to give careful consideration to where you put your rockin’ content.

Above the fold/below the fold

“Above the fold” is an old newspaper term that translates well to the internet. When we say “above the fold,” we’re referring to the top of the web page (before visitors start scrolling down). This top area of the web site should be for converting sales; all the content should be conversion-based.

For example, Barnes & Noble recently featured a graphic and some brief review excerpts about the Nook, the bookstore’s e-reader. It includes the price ($139) and a “Buy Now” button with the words “Free Shipping” beneath.

Click on the box and you’re taken to a page with more information about the Nook. Scroll down and you get additional information, review excerpts and accessories. “Below the fold” – the bottom part of the web page where you need to scroll down to read – should be aimed at converting search engines. This area should be very textheavy and should provide authoritative content for both the user and the search engine. For example, the below-the-fold section of the dosurfin SEO website features the logos of five prominent customers and a brief summary of the company’s business philosophy.

Landing pages

Most of your landing pages should be fully functioning (not just dynamically generated) category pages. In other words, the best way to use your site’s authority is to consolidate that authority. For example, if you’re selling running shoes, you should have a “domain.com/running shoes” page on your site that’s full of killer information about running shoes.

Blog

You need to engage your customers with interesting, relevant content on your corporate blog. However, be careful not to cannibalize yourself by creating a blog that competes with your website. If you’re targeting running shoes, for example, don’t start every blog post title with “running shoes”. That will look unnatural and will create a lot of internal competition for the search engine spiders to figure out.

Every website needs to have a blog. If you don’t have the resources to host a blog, then you probably don’t deserve to rank highly for your keywords. Sorry, but that’s the truth.

Product descriptions

Search engine rankings are all about competition. If all the companies in a search engine ranking page are using the manufacturer’s product descriptions, the few companies that go the extra mile (in most cases, even just a few inches) will be the ones that rank highest.

Think about this competition factor. Read your content and ask yourself if you really deserve to rank compared to your competitors. If your honest assessment tells you that your content is lacking, then you need to find a way to step up your game. Your product descriptions should be authoritative and honest. These descriptions are your unique content and will be read by countless potential customers. Few websites can hold a candle to Amazon.com when it comes to product descriptions. The description below provides a compelling overview of Tom Clancy’s new book, with a paragraph below describing Clancy’s writing career.

Format Matters

Make sure you give plenty of consideration to the format of your content. It’s important to produce content that people can easily scan through, readers will get a better idea of whether they want to take the time to read something if they can skim through it first. One way to make your content reader-friendly is to create lists that can help people scan your content. If you produce audio files, videos or images, make sure you transcribe it on the page as well to get maximum SEO value. Transcription allows Google and Bing to interpret the text just like a normal web page. The more relevant a video’s content is to a search, the more that video will benefit from transcription.

WHY?

Google has made it clear that content is important when it comes to its ranking of

websites. A May post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog explains the search engine’s perspective on what makes high-quality websites. The insightful post includes more than 20 questions involving content, such as “Would you trust the information presented in this article?” and “Does the article provide original information, original reporting, original research or original analysis?”

This Google post came in the wake of the highly publicized “Panda” algorithm change that aimed to improve the rankings of high-quality websites. The post encourages you to focus on providing the best possible experience to your website visitors – not worry about Google’s ranking algorithms.

That’s a Wrap

Well, there you have it. We’ve covered the 5 W’s of content creation. Now it’s time to create that best-in-class content that will attract readers, keep them on your site and help you increase your sales.

Keep in mind that content is only one part of the equation when it comes to website optimization. Content represents one element of dosurfin SEO’s five-part CLASS methodology.

Some random tips are hitting my mind. So, I thought I will better share them so that you can remind them too.

• Cloaking is black hat method showing different pages for users and search engine bot.
• 301 redirect is to inform crawlers that the page has been permanently moved to new URL.
• 302 redirect is to inform crawlers that the page has been temporarily located in another URL and will be relocated soon.
• It’s best practice to use ‘http://www.site.com/contact’ structure instead of  only ‘/contact’ for internal linking.
• You are instructed to keep “rel=”nofollow” ” by Google for paid link so that it don’t pass juice to sponsored links.
• Bulk link buying was and will never be best practice to build natural links.
• Sitemap should be generated for every website so that spiders can crawl all of your links thoroughly.
• Never give outbound link with anchor text that you are targetting as your keyword.
• Increasing crawl rate by search spiders for your website can be increased with frequent content addition.
• Never compete your own pages for same keyword.  Search in Google with operator “site:site.com keyword” to know which page is liked by Google most for your keyword.
• Never part your backlink building strategy with only one method continuously. Mix all those strategy at once so that your backlinks doesn’t look spammy. For example: never build backlink through blog commenting only for a month but use directory submission and link baiting too.
• Check frequently if you have broken links in your website.
• Make the most from Google Webmaster Tool and Google Analytics.
• Make your Title Tag less than 65 (I don’t agree with this though as Google can read a lot more than this limit and gives value too. But make first 65 character juicy so your CTR increases)

That’s all I remember right now randomly. Add yours too.

Many webmasters who are new in SEO don’t get their website indexed in Google. They do get indexed with flow of time but there are some more ways to get your website indexed in Google ASAP. This method is saving a lots of your time. So, just make sure that you complete all below methods.

1. Get your Sitemap and submit it to Google Webmasters Tools
2. Get some backlinks from your other websites if available

I know you know these both methods already but you might not have tried this one.

3.  Get an account in buzzfeed.com and bookmark your website there. But make sure that you will get dofollow backlink from ‘Description’ because it’s Title is nofollow. Hence use HTML tag in this way in Description.

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”>Anchor Text</a> and give a lots of description for your website.

4. Call Google Bot directly with this url http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

5. Go to http://www.google.com/addurl

That’s all you can do to get your website indexed in Google. But I would recommend to get links from multiple websites. If you don’t get indexed yet with all those methods then try Nepal SEO

I had some dispute with my client somedays ago. He was saying that he got indexed all of his pages indexed in Google so don’t need a sitemap. I didn’t have any reason for him at that time. I just said that, having sitemap is not going to give you pain and it isn’t taking a lots of time too. So, why won’t you give around 2 minute to create sitemap? He said OK but didn’t updated Sitemap. Some days later we made changes to whole design without change in content. And looked last visit by Google. The design was still old. And visit date was different for every pages. What does that mean? If I am asked then I will say that, it was because Google bot visited those inner pages through backlinks only as we didn’t have sitemap for Google so it could easily crawl pages. It left the pages without crawling as it felt difficult. In other words, Google didn’t find it’s path in website.

So, let’s get sitemap. You can have plugin ready to generate sitemap as you update your website. If you don’t have one then you can simply generate one from http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. It will generate sitemap for you at free of cost.

That was for XML sitemap for Google but what’s for users? You can create  HTML sitemap for users. Users might get lost in your website. Hence get a path for them too. They will love to see all the ways you got in your website. They will love it more than searching in your search box all the time.

If you created both sitemap then you can submit your XML sitemap in Google Webmaster tool. In this way you can optimize your website far better for Google bot and get your report too.

Hence, don’t feel bore to create sitemap.

As I always say SEO is not shell game . The best and important way to get high SERP and to bring genuine traffic is not to make website for search engine crawlers but for users. Don’t over optimize your website for Google Bots but optmize them for users. Here are some forever green methods to get organic traffic. This is not hard to implement and you don’t need to waste your brain to think over it.

1. Describe your content in short in title. That means make your Title perfect.
2. Optimize your meta tags. I don’t usually say to optimize meta tags but still it doesn’t loss your traffic. So go for nice and clean meta tags.
3. Don’t make your website hard to crawl for bots. Make your HTML code clean and easy crawling. You can test your HTML code at W3 VAlidator.
4. Provide clean and easy URL structure. It’s good to have ‘domain.com/seo-training’ instead of ‘domain.com/?id=89′
5. Provide alternate text for images.
6. Provide metadata or optional text for rich media applications like flash.
7. While providing hierarchies data or similar in your pages, optimize HTML codes. In this way bots can crawl your pages easily and can understand what you are providing.
8. Provide information with easy navigation. Make sure users don’t need to search your site always when they are back.
9. Optimize internal links and outgoing links.

Conclusion: Make website for users but not for Google.