Hi, my name is Virginie Dorn from Business Website Center, talking to you from beautiful California.

Today, I would like to talk to you about content marketing. That word has been around for quite a few years now, but truly what does it mean for you, your website, and your business? Content marketing is just that. It is the marketing of your services and product by using content. Now it sounds very simple, but it’s not easy. Everybody can write. I mean, we’re doing essay in high school and college. But it’s not that easy to write content that Google loves. There’s a whole technique and an art to it. It’s all about writing not just quality content that directly relates to what you’re doing, but also writing content that is attractive to visitors, but attractive to the search engine bots, especially Google, the big master Google.

When we write content at Business Website Center, first and foremost, we do all our content in-house. We don’t farm it out to some far away countries or people working in garages. We write it in-house here in Petaluma, California. What we take into consideration is two things. First, how do you want to portray yourself? Exactly what kind of content you want to deliver to your customers or prospective customers, to showcase yourself as true experts in your industry? Number two, is what kind of content do we need to write for Google ’cause we want Google to like the content as well. We want Google to look at the content of each page and say, “Man, they are really good at what they’re doing; therefore, I shall rank them on page one of my search engine.”

There’s always a fine balance between pleasing the bots and pleasing your prospective customers. There is some secrets in our trade about how many keywords you should be using in your content. But most importantly, how often, what variations about keywords, what combination of keywords we could put, and how many paragraphs, and there’s also something about the ratio of text versus photos. For instance, if you were to do a page, then had a hundred photos, it gives you very limited search engine optimization ability because you have a hundred images, you can maybe name the images properly. Perhaps you’re in the business of selling shoes, so one image could be high heels, the other one is boots. Again, you only get a hundred opportunities. You can use alt tags and title tags for each of those image and that would be called an optimized image. You don’t want just photos, you want text. Google craves content. It’s what it’s looking for. It is in the business of distributing content to the billions of people using Google everyday.

It’s very important to have a content marketing strategy in place. How we do it here is we take a look at your business activities for the next few months. Are you going to be attending any trade shows? Are you releasing new products? Are you trying to push certain services or product, first and foremost, because this is where your bread and butter is. If that’s the case, we build the content to push those services forward, therefore giving you the highest return on investment.

Content is not just content. It’s not just writing pretty text. It totally has to have a strategy in place in order to be effective and make sense and also push your website forward on page one of Google. This is all called content marketing. So when you do your business plan, you also should have a marketing plan, and content marketing should definitely be a full chapter all by itself in it. If you’re ever interested in establishing a marketing plan for your company, you can come and talk to us. We absolutely offer our services and maybe you have a marketing staff then you could do it.

Again, make sure you include the content marketing option because it’s becoming more and more important to the success of your website and of your company. If you have any questions, give us a call. Otherwise, I wish you a happy marketing campaign. Bye-bye.