Keeping Content King & Not Crap.

January 15th, 2008, 10:26 am Michael SEO

Every SEO will come across that one site that is very straight forward with a negative amount of content on it. Usually it will be a combination of a bit of actual text but mainly just some pictures and a flash file here or there.

So what the heck do you do to make it a bit more substantial?

I for one love a good clean wordpress install but not labeled as a blog - instead I use “News” or “Information” heading on the menu bar. I then find a theme which matches the main site as close as possible. Throw a bit of my css/php ability in there and I can usually make it look as if it was an extension of the site.

So bam, you have just made a normal site now have an RSS feed and also the ability to hold a lot of content which you control and write.

So what to write?

Topical content generally sucks & rather then blast the user with 25 pages of meaningless crap which is nothing more then a bunch of keywords repeated 20 times with some sentences in between - I tend to use the Google Keywords Suggestion tool to aid me in my writing. I drop my main keywords into the tool and see what other ones google comes up with. I then sort the results by Avg Search Volume and begin to write from the top. This way when I get to the bottom hopefully big “G” will have already graced my first posts with its presence so I will be able to have fresh new content on a high volume search term ready and waiting for its next visit. After each time I post I usually run to a blog ping site and let all the blog scrapers know that I got some new stuff going on and they should come and check it out. Make sure you do your best at trying to keep the articles on topic and actually something that the person would want to read - cause this is also where social bookmarking can come in. Remember the better your article & information you give the better your chances are to get in links from it via a Social bookmarking site.

So, you have some content on your site - but the only way to get to it is from 1 single link off of the main page - how can we pull some of the information onto the main site and still make it look good? There is 2 ways to do this - the ghetto way or the respectable coder way.

1) the Ghetto way - Pulling the RSS feed from Wordpress and displaying it on your homepage. This is not that difficult if you are using php. If you are using HTML on the main page it gets a bit tricky. If you are a ninja coder you should be able to figure it out - if you are not - there is a freeware script that will actually do it for you. You will have to edit the CSS to make it all blend and It might take a bit to figure out. But this way you will be able to gain some good changing content on your homepage while also gaining substance in the back of the site.

2)the Respectable coder way - If you are using PHP the other way to do this would be to actually make a call to the MySql database and display the topics & a snippet from the postings on the homepage. Now I am not a respectable coder by any means so I can not take credit for what I am about to post here - this was actually done by someone else for the site I was working on. (Credit: J.P. & Dan Zarrella)

$buff = mysql_query('SELECT ID, post_title FROM wp_posts ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 3');
while($line = mysql_fetch_assoc($buff)) {
echo "<a href='--YOUR%20WORDPESS%20DIR--/?p=$line[id]'>$line[title]</a>";
}


So what the above code does is gives you the Title of your 3 latest wordpress posts. Now again I am no coder so more then likely you are going to need to do a bit of tweaking in there to get it to work properly - but you get the basic idea. This is the best way I have found to keep some fresh content on a site that is lacking a place for content and sometimes a need for it.

..send this around..