In response to @randfish post http://seomz.me/gzsci4 I thought I would also share a dead simple SEO technique that will help you everyday of the week.
Content
Content makes the web go round, but good content can be difficult to create.
Today I want to talk about two tools that I use to help with content creation.
First the problem: I have trouble coming up with new ideas for content that people will be interested and willing to share. Sharing and linking makes creating content worthwhile. If people arent willing to share or link to your content then your content might as well not exist.
With the content I’ve created over the years I’ve found that good sharable content has to sit within at least one of the following categories:
- Amazing quality – the best thing I’ve ever read on a subject
- Lists – top 10 lists on a subject are a great way to get your content shared
- Topical – fresh, new and interesting
Like I said, good linkage content needs to sit within at least one of those categories if it sits in more you have more chance of getting shared and linked to.
Now I don’t know about you but I haven’t got hours a day to create ‘amazing’ quality with every blog post I write. I also haven’t always got enough content to create top 10 lists of every subject I want to blog about.
Create Topical Content!
I use Google Trends to find fresh content ideas. A lot of people have suggested using Google Trends to have new and interesting topics of content in the past, and they’ve suggested in because it works, but this post will tell you now to get Google Trends to work harder for you.
Above is the standard Google Trends screen where you can see the latest trending topics. By going to more trends you get a list of the top 20 hottrends of the moment using this list you can start to generate ideas for blog topics that are topical and trending at the moment.
You aren’t limited to just the hottrends right now, you can change the date to look at the previous hottrends – whilst these aren’t topical anymore this is still useful for ideas generation and if something has been trending for a couple of days you can see any different search terms that have been used.
The way I use Google Trends is to grab the RSS feed and add it to Google Reader. This RSS feed is updated every hour and you can see all the associated search terms for that Trend.
Once you have the RSS feed in Reader you can start to filter hottrends that you are interested in. You can also click through to the trends page and see the latest blog posts and news stories. This gives me interesting concepts to create content from. That isn’t it – hottrends is good but I want it to associate with subject matters that I am interested in.
I use another Google tool in order to get hottrends within my areas of interest – Google search
By using the above operator template you can search for any trending topics and find relevant content that will give you all the ideas you need to create content on a daily basis.
More on content creation ideas:
- http://www.jaankanellis.com/google-hot-trends-content-ideas/
- http://broadcasting-brain.com/2008/05/21/popular-blog-post-tip/
- http://hugablogger.blogspot.com/2011/04/blogging-coming-up-with-blog-post-ideas.html