Managing Content

The good news is that many companies produce a large amount of relevant, diverse and legitimate content, including articles, Web site text, speeches, testimonials, press materials, and more. Often, this content has not been effectively leveraged and may be locked up in the company’s corporate communications group. It is up to the company to provide effective links to bring this out in the open. A suggestion that I found was that third-party partner content, such as partner Web sites and industry/company reports, must also be leveraged since no one company can dominate all of its top listings.

Effectively deployed and managed, search engine management can be quite powerful. An example of this is: A global human resources company recently found a highly-negative listing ranking No. 5 under its brand name in Google. The company, which advertised aggressively, was finding potential candidates were searching for references for the company online and finding this negative -- and false -- information planted by former, disgruntled employees. Sales dropped precipitously. After utilizing an array of primary and third-party content, the negative listing was pushed out of the top 30 listings; thus, sales rebounded. Managing content is important to utilize both positive and negative listings.

Article Writing and Submission

Using articles to obtain strategic links can be an extremely effective method during a linking campaign. Not only do you control the anchor texts within the copy which point to your site, valuable articles can be picked up by any number of additional locations. There are a few key things to remember when writing creatives to improve the inbound link quality of a site.

The closer an article is to blatant advertisement, the less of a chance it has at being posted and picked by other content syndication sites. Rather than write about how great your products or services are, content should be informative and interesting. This way, a well-written article about industry news, tips or opinions will be published and picked up, with the strategic anchor text being placed on more and more sites.

If you don’t like to write, there is an endless supply of articles on free content sites. Simply find appropriate articles and email the author. Nine times out of ten they will be happy to lend you the article, as it spreads their content to another location.

There is a very helpful list of free article submission sites at http://www.searchguild.com/redir/o.php?out=http://www.info-sales.co.uk/article.htm