I blogged recently about creating quality content. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of creating great content, that people actually want to read, it makes sense to get the most out of it, so here are some suggestions for how to do that.

Syndicate your content

It seems obvious, but it’s surprising how often it gets forgotten in the rush to move onto the next item on your to do list. Whether it’s a blog post or a new page on your website make sure you share it with as many different people as possible. Tools like NetworkedBlogs make this easier by automatically sending your blog posts out to your Twitter and Facebook feeds and save you having to remember.

Social bookmarking is another good way to get your content out there. Sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon are all useful, as well as niche bookmarking sites that relate to your industry. Just make sure you follow the guidelines and don’t only bookmark your own content.

If you write an email newsletter then you can also use this to point subscribers towards content that they might find useful too.

Make it easy for others to share

Getting others to share your content is even more effective than doing it yourself as it will then be read by people out of your network too. Hopefully you’ve already got social media buttons added to each of your web pages and blog posts to make it easy for others to share them on their favourite social networking sites. An occasional little nudge or reminder asking people to share a particular article if they find it useful won’t do any harm either.

Internal linking

If you’re referring to a topic already covered in a previous blog post or on another website page then link directly to it to make it easy for people to find other relevant content. Internal linking is important within your website and blog and helps both search engines and readers to find more of your content.

Recycle content

If you’ve written a good article or blog post it won’t take you long to rewrite it (to avoid duplicate content which the search engines frown on) so that it’s suitable for use on another website or blog. Writing guest posts on another blog or articles for another website is a great way to get more exposure for your own website as well as a link back. Using existing content and rewriting it saves you from having to come up with another idea or having do any additional research for a brand new article.

Do you know of any other great ways to get the most out of your content? Please add a comment to share your suggestions.

Linking is a technique that has been around for some years.  Originally it was focussed around submitting your business to a large number of directories, some of these directories were thought of more highly than others.  This depended on the popularity and scale of each individual directory.  But things have come a long way, most people don’t like directories very much, when they search for something they are looking for the individual websites of relevant businesses to appear in the search results, so the search engines took notice and now it’s very rare you will see a directory in the search results at all.  In fact if you do see one, it’s normally because there aren’t many other websites that are relevant enough to be displayed.  Whilst directory submission haven’t disappeared all together they aren’t really where the focus is any more.

Social media came along and kind of changed linking completely.  The thing to remember is that on the whole Search Engine Optimisation is driven by great content, the key is then to create those links by using your content in lots of different places across the internet.  The reason social media has become so important is that a search engine is going to see a review or recommendation as much more important and trustworthy than a business talking about how fantastic they are.  So whilst it can take time, builidng up organic links through writing about your business and industry in an engaging way is the best way to go.

Unfortunately, this can take time and so many businesses are speeding up this process using social media to ‘explode’ their message across the internet in the hope that people will share, converse and comment on the content that they have provided.  Oh and remember that this content doesn’t have to be words, it can be images, video, podcasts pretty much anything really.

One of the other ways to build links is through article marketing, this is the process of posting your great content on several article sites, within these articles you will place links back to your website, thus helping to create your own links and giving readers a way of finding out more about the subject matter.  Article took a bit of a hit earlier this year when Google changed it’s algorithm, but like directoriy submissions there is still value in this form of marketing.  More recently we have seen the use of blogs to build these links.

So in summary, if you have a campaign where you are partaking in all of these things then you are very likely to be building those links that you need.

Internal links are incredibly important, so how do you know if your internal linking strategy is working properly.  If you have broken links then not only is a search engine spider going to struggle, but visitors to your website won’t have a great time if they can’t get to the content that they want to read because a link is taking them to a page that doesn’t exist.

Make sure you check your links on a regular basis to ensure that they are still taking people where they should be and if you are doing some work on the content on your site then be really wary of changing the url of existing pages.  It can be quite tricky to suss our where you have broken links so it’s always a good idea to try and minimise them in the first place.  If you do make url changes then remember that this will impact on inbound links as well.  As a rule of thumb, don’t change url names as it is really difficult to track all inbound links and almost impossible to change them.  You don’t want to waste months of work for the sake of a name change.

Internal links are really important for SEO as well as inbound links, they help a search engine work out where it needs to go next on your website and can help stress the importance of certain pages and keywords.  Make sure your links are keyword rich and don’t forget that if you don’t link to a page then no one can get to it, sounds simple but it does happen.

Find out more about link building

Link building is vitally important in having a successful SEO campaign.  There are two different types of links, external links which is when other websites link to yours and secondly, internal links which are links between pages on your website.  To have a strong linking strategy you need to be doing both.

Link building should form an integral part of your internet marketing strategy, it has an enormous positive effect on your SEO efforts.  But getting those all important links can be hard work.  Links are someones way of giving you a mini referral, it’s like someone saying, “hey go check these people out, they know what they’re talking about”.

The best kind of links to get are organic links, where websites or blogs link to you because they have found something they genuinely feel is of interest to their own audience, if it is a popular site in itself with a good page rank then the link is what we call a ‘quality link’.