How to Create Unique Content

If you’ve been in the SEO game for a few years then you have no doubt seen how much more competitive the marketplace is becoming. Never before in the history of the Internet have so many pages been getting indexed so fast. The number of pages being indexed has tripled from this time last year. That is truly staggering.

Here is my take on what is going on…

Out of those who search the Internet, on any given day, there’s only a small percentage who are engaged in marketing online or SEO. Out of those who are active in SEO only a small percentage of those people half way know what they are doing. Out of those, there is an even smaller percentage who actually do things right.

The fact that the indexing of web pages has tripled since last year leads me to one conclusion. Web site automation software!

You have, no doubt, seen the clever marketing methods to promote software that will literally create hundreds or thousands of content pages based on a keyword list that you enter. They promise huge profits and cause many people to buy domain after domain and getting indexed for hundreds and thousands of those pages. They promise wealth through sheer numbers. Throw up 100,000 pages in a month (or a week) and watch that trickle of money start to flow, they say.

While the method does work, and you can get indexed for thousands of pages, is it worth it? Consider this…

Google, Yahoo and MSN are literally choking on new pages. Most of the pages that are being indexed are pure junk from a real visitor’s perspective. Google has employed an army to manually check pages, de-index them and move to the next. While they are checking these pages, the Google brains are hard at work building footprint catchers into their algorithm.

By the next Google update, you will see de-indexing on a scale unheard of before. A domain registered for 1 year that suddenly has 100, 200, 300 or 5,000 new web pages in just 1 week is a huge footprint! A new website cannot possibly be writing content that fast and a 1 year domain registration instantly sets off alarms.

The question you have to ask yourself is, “How big is my footprint?”

One of the biggest mistakes made by people who set out “to make their fortune on the internet” is the distinct lack of a business plan and a simple process to put that plan into action. They look for an easy out where there is none. In order to succeed online you must work. You can’t work haphazardly. You must have a plan, a business plan, and you must stick to it no matter what.

The Plan (SEO Strategy) that I have written (and you have hopefully read) is my personal plan for Internet success. It works for me without fail because I am providing a good service to both real visitors and the search engines. I am rewarded for doing things right and following the guidelines that have been set. I will survive all of the algorithm changes. Will you?

You may see domains with thousands of pages, but only a few, if any, will appear in the top 20 results. The theory here is each search engine gives a domain a certain amount of “rankingness” to be spread over the pages indexed. The fewer the pages, the more “rankingness” each page is allocated. This is just theory but it has been tested and that is what leads me to this conclusion. The search engines are not dumb and know that you cannot possibly have more than “X” amount of pages on any given topic and still be relevant.

I have come to the conclusion that SEO that focuses on rankings rather than quality is dying hard and fast. As a SEO you must change hats and focus your SEO on relevance and quality for the “real” visitors and take focus away from rankings. This focus is what will be and is fast becoming the new wave of SEO. This way of thinking will lead to higher rankings and will lead to that $10 - $15 a day profit per website that you are seeking.

About Content

A big trend that I am seeing is the creation of content just for the sake of creating content. The buzz in the SEO industry right now is content, content, content. The problem is, most SEOs don’t have a clue what that means. From this trend has sprung a whole industry of companies who will write content for you. Most of these companies create new content using a MadLib strategy of just filling in the blanks. They simply insert your target keywords into an existing template and then sell it to you for $1 to $15 each. This is disgusting! This kind of content is written for the purpose of ranking in the search engines. It is not good content written for humans, it is crappy content written to try and fool the search engines for ranking purposes.

In “The Plan” I allot 4 hours a week to “pure content creation”. I don’t mean go use a nifty piece of software to spin new articles off of existing ones. I mean, go to a quiet place and write your own articles, in your own words, from your own perspective.

Do genuine reviews with genuine insight. Excite the reader with your comments, go out on a ledge and create some controversy, do something different. These days it is not hard to be different because everyone else is concentrating on tired old strategies that spit out pages and content that human visitors are literally sick and tired of. In the eyes of the search engines this is war. SEOs all over the planet are hurling massive amounts of garbage at the search engines and they are fighting back hard to keep humans interested in visiting.

There is a rewarding future for you by genuinely contributing quality to the search engines. This is where things are heading.

How to Get Ideas for Writing Content

My favorite thing to do is visit forums, websites & blogs and jot down some interesting, brain squeezing, snippets that inspire me to voice my own viewpoint, opinion or knowledge. I then take all of these ideas about the niche I’m working on and start creating articles that will genuinely interest people.

I know I have plenty of time. I have a whole week that is devoted to my new topic. At the end of 48 weeks (according to the plan), I have the comfort of knowing that I have written original, good quality articles that people will like to read and link to.

Once you put your mind to it, you will be shocked at how many articles you can spit out in just 4 hours a week. Go ahead and try it.

See what Jason Potash has to say about articles and content for 2006 and beyond. This is a great PDF report that reinforces a lot of what I have been saying. (Download: Content in 2006)

Your 4 Hour Content Creation Schedule:

By the end of hour four you’ll have 6 – 9 new fresh articles to build your new site around. Don’t worry if you are not the best writer in the world. What counts is the fact that your writing is original and with practice you will get better and better. By the end of a year you’ll be spitting out articles in a flash with minimal effort. By the end of a year, you will find that creating an article takes just a few minutes.

Outsourcing Content Creation