SEO: Tricks and Tips- III

Basic SEO: Tricks and Tips - How to Get Content

When adding content to your site, it's probably a good idea to compare your site to its relevant competitors that rank well in the search engines. If you think your site has better optimized content than they do, you can start to focus on other aspects of your site, like links. But this section is for when you need content and there are three different ways to get it: writing it yourself, getting someone else to write it, or using content that exists somewhere else.

Writing content yourself can entail several different techniques, but for the purpose of this article, I'm going to focus on writing articles and writing summaries of other online articles. And since writing your own articles is self-explanatory, I'll just say that this is a time consuming process and not everyone is a good writer (trust me). If you're going to summarize other articles that are linked to your site, make sure the summaries have the appropriate keywords and that the article is indeed related to your site. This is obviously much quicker than writing entire articles, but you do need the original author's permission. Instead of writing full-blown articles, you can also write short reviews about websites or products that are relevant to your site.

Getting someone else to write your content should fall in line with the dirty tricks I mentioned in the first two sections, at least in my opinion. For the most part, you're getting someone else to do the work for you for as little pay as possible, possibly even for free, if you're a good liar. I won't lie, writers are cheap (again, trust me), despite the fact that good ones are hard to find. If you do find one and are willing to pay them, it would be smart to draw up some kind of contract stating that it is “work for hire” and that you are buying all rights to the work. This probably isn't necessary, though, if it's a large company and the person works for you full time.

Using content that already exists is the quick and easy way to add content to your site. It is important, however, to avoid copyright infringement – putting someone else's material on your site without their permission – unless, of course, you like getting sued. The main thing to remember is that you do not need to register for a copyright for it to still be copyrighted material. In the next section, I'll go over some of the places you can look for content to put on your site.