Creating high quality content links is one of the most important ways to be ranked well and get search engine traffic. If your Website does not offer anything worth talking about you are going to struggle to get people link to it, and search engines rank it. And even if perhaps you succeed to trick Google and get ranked well for a while, your visitors are very likely to simply bounce away when they visit it. Consequently, you might have to beg or pay for every inbound link with questionable success, and you will see what a pain it is to promote mediocre content.
On the other hand, imagine your content is so good, that every other person who finds it feels the need to share it. With great content you only need to attract some initial traffic to get the snowball rolling – visitors will often share it on social networks for you, webmasters will link to it, search engines will love it.
Sounds simple? Well, it’s not. Creating high quality content is actually the hard part. With so many great blogs, articles, info-graphics and free stuff out there on the Internet, it’s no longer enough to publish something unique. It should be smart, attractive, mind-blowing, visually appealing and worth talking about.
That’s not an easy task, but here are few ideas that will help you:
Be Generous On Images
Plain text is boring. People rarely link to text only pages except in few niches like scientific research and programming. Don’t be afraid to add one or more images to your posts. Have at least one large sexy image instead of a thumbnail. Only use thumbnails if your content is really rich in images and you want to save the bandwidth of your users.
Although with web resources such as Flickr around, there is no excuse for contents without at least one image.
Don’t forget also that images do not always mean photos. When appropriate, enrich your content with info-graphics, interactive charts, drawings and sketches. It takes little effort or money to create them, but they will surely make your content stick in the sea of text.
Link To Useful Resources
Don’t be afraid to link out. Include links to relevant high quality resources along with your content. People are a lot more likely to bookmark, link to, and share contents that contains link to other resources.
However, do not take linking out to the extreme and publish resource collections instead of content. While this may sometimes works, I recommend that you include at least some of your own comments, intro text and a closing paragraph.
The best combination however remains strong content with links to other high-quality pages.
Vouch Strong Opinion
Being too diplomatic may seem objective because you are not hurting anyone and there is no chance to say something stupid. There is barely a chance to say something interesting, too.
Being dry is… dry. Don’t be yet another fact-reporter and boring analyst. Share your opinion, your dislikes, your story, your passion. Someone may think you are dumb or too harsh, but others will fight for you and promote your content. Strong opinion bears strong fans.
Bundle With A Tool
If you have or can hire development resources to build a relevant tool for your content, don’t hesitate to do it. An article about losing weight bundled with a weight loss calculator on the page is a lot more linkable than an article which just shows static numbers.
There are all kind of tools you can embed in or bundle with your content: calculators, widgets, converters, planners, calendars, Firefox and Chrome extensions, WordPress plugins and many more.
Make It Printable/Download-able
What does it cost to create a PDF version of your article? Almost nothing. But it looks so much more complete with high authority when there is an option to download or print.
If you provide PDF versions of your content, with the URL of your site inside, some people will download it and check it later, others will print it and share it, others will link to it just because of the format. It’s an easy way to gain few links and enhance the perceived quality of your page.
Deep, Not Long
It’s wrong to think that good content should be long. Yes sure, sometimes you need few thousand words to express a great idea or describe a complex concept. But to use more words so as just to make your content long is not going to help you rank in search engines.
Instead of adding paragraphs rephrasing what you already said earlier, just to meet a target word count, ask yourself what details can you add to your content, what additional point of view can be discussed, what other form of content can be plugged in.
No Sales Pitches
Don’t mix your sales pages with your best content. With few extremely creative exceptions, sales pitches don’t attract links. Focus on providing high quality, useful content that will be linked to and shared and keep it clear of sales pitches. If there is something you want to sell, use your high quality content as a traffic source to your sales page. Feel free to link to it or even advertise it with a large button, but keep all the sales talk on the sales page only.
Now check your best ranking content. How many of these tips does it follow? What’s going to happen if you apply more of them to it, right now?
Thank you for this info! I just introduced myself to the blogging world! I’ve launched three sites. The first one has so far been my most successful one. Funny it’s the one I put the most effort into. The second two aren’t ranking to well. I know why though! I started to cut corners and the site doen’t have content unique to visitors! I linked out but decided to get lazy! Is it too late to re-write my content and improve my rankings, and should I focus mainly on my homepage content? ANYONE?
Josh
I would say it is not too late to improve your rankings. Just focus on other general SEO aspects that could improve the other two sites including new quality content which would feature on the homepage over time.
Its never too late to improve you quality of content just improve the posts and re-publish them. Make sure that you do not focus only on the homepage if you have written an interesting post do some promotion for it via social media or any other, always link back to your articles from other related articles and do some link building and marketing for these articles if your inner pages get links indeed the link juice will flow over to your home page.
That is right too many images increase your site load time and finally you loose customers.
Usually people discuss the most basic elements of quality content. In this post you have shared some very important and key elements of quality content that normally no one notices.
Well said WSP.
Good point, especially about the images. For people with an SEO focus, this can fall by the wayside.
Great info and I like the idea about images. Plain text is really boring but too many
advertising look messy.. great post!
Very nice post. Link building is not an easy task indeed. You may contact several webmasters but very few will respond positively.
That’s true but then again sometimes it’s kind of difficult to tell genuine requests apart from automated ones.
Hi Bob!
I would like to point out this:
“Have at least one large sexy image instead of a thumbnail.”
Funny as it sounds, but I have proven it to work. More readers would stop by to check what the content was all about and the photos that are used are not in any way offensive.
True, it is hard to have quality content when everybody is as creative as you. If this is the case, then you just have to look around for inspiration.
I truly agree with you when you said that you have to voice out your opinion even when it may be against the general point of view. If you want to spark the curiosity in your articles, you have to light the fire.
I love your post!
As for images, remember you do have to get people on your site first to see the images. However, using a photoblog may also useful.
You are right but don’t forget images often become the entry point of your site through the image search engines (like images.google.com). I have sites that have tons of traffic from it because they have catchy original images. Even when using someone else’s images (when it’s allowed of course) you can rank higher than them in image search
Some good ideas. But if I had to give just one piece of advice, it would be “focus on the content”. Focus on good, unique, informative content and people will link to you. There’s too much spam on the web, and good content always stands out.
great tips dude, they are very useful for me to create linkable contents
Good content, use of more and more images shorten the quality of website as it takes more time to load.
such a good 7 tips Bob Handz.. i like & i will follow it. thanks again
Couldn’t agree more. There is nothing worse than waiting ages for a page to load because of too many unnecessary images. Good post
Couldn’t agree more. Too many images are a waste of time
Great tips!! I’m so glad I read it.. I learned a lot!.. thank you..
Great post.
Content is King!
I found “Vouch Strong Opinion” especially interesting.
Strong opinions bears strong fans. That is gold.
You can take advantage of this by writing from an opinion that will evoke the strongest reactions(not by insulting/hurting or shocking anyone), The opinion doesn’t necessarily have to be your own, but it probably should be consistent with your other writings.
Also putting some links to respected companies/authorities in the field of your posts subject, helps google to understand what your content is about and as I have experienced it helps in the rankings.
these are very nice tips! glad I read it! thanks for sharing this..
That is what I hate about people trying to write a certain amount of words to make Google happy. They rehash and reword their stuff constantly, wasting my time. I don’t want to read the same stuff again, I got it the first time.
making your content so good that any reader would feel the need to share it! that would be the best!
I agree with joe, the best thing to create that high quality linkable content is making the content so good, most or all of the readers will just want to share it with others..
Some great tips here. I especially like the point about not needing to write for the hell of it. You CAN write just a few hundred words to get a point across; it need not be an essay 🙂
Making a point in post is certainly worth the sharing and all.. that is a very nice way to build those highly linkable articles!
This are very useful to create linkable contents. The most important is the content. Good advice to put some images on the posts. Thanks for this!
Thanks for sharing. love it.
For SEO purpose, long content is favorable than the shorter one. But for the sake of blog readers, it is important to make every post much shorter with tons of useful ideas. In this way, they could truly appreciate the post. Who knows, they might be a recurring visitor of the blog.