Our Omaha web design team knows that striking, original, and useful content development is a key tool in your business’ SEO utility belt. As you begin developing your content, though, it can be hard to know where to start, and you’ll most likely look to others in your industry to join an ongoing conversation about issues that are important to your clients.
Gathering ideas for content in this way can definitely be a useful technique, but it can be easy to fall into unethical content-gathering practices if you’re not careful. Here are some pointers from our Omaha SEO team to help you start creating fantastic content while avoiding common content curation pitfalls.
Give credit where it’s due
Linking back prominently to your sources’ original work is a content creation best practice and common sense courtesy. If someone else has written about an idea that you feel strongly enough about to pick up and distribute further, acknowledging that person’s contribution to the discourse is a must.
Keep direct quotes short and minimal
While it’s often necessary to quote other sources when you’re discussing a given topic, it’s always best for your quotes to be brief and to the point. This way your article’s focus will always be about your contribution to the conversation in progress.
Another added benefit to this practice is that it gives you the opportunity to send traffic to your original source. By offering just a tidbit of their article to pique a reader’s interest and then linking to the full text, you’re paying tribute and building good SEO karma.
More sources are better
To get in the proper content creation mindset, namely that curation is about looking to others’ work for inspiration and adding to the existing conversation, it’s important to broaden your scope of research to include many sources. If you lean too heavily on one or two sources, you run the risk of boring your audience by simply regurgitating information they’ve already heard elsewhere.
Alternatively, weaving the ideas of multiple credible sources into your articles and genuinely interacting with those ideas positions you as an expert in the industry, one who has a good idea of where the new and interesting ideas are coming from and has something original to say about them, as well
What’s your point of view?
This is the pointer to end all pointers, and we’ve been hinting at and building toward it throughout this post. As a content curator, it’s your responsibility to add your voice to the ongoing industry conversation. This may seem daunting at first because you risk a lot by putting yourself and your ideas out there for the scrutiny of other industry leaders, but take it from us, you need to develop those chops by publishing original, thought-provoking content that people can agree or disagree with and add to themselves—that’s the kind of content that gets your company noticed and talked about in a good way!
Let Us Guide You In Your Content Creation Process!
Our content creation team at Big Red SEO hopes that this guide gives you some good ideas to think about as you start to research and create new content for your business website. By maintaining ethical practices you can position yourself not only as an industry leader but also as a knowledgeable and trustworthy source of information.
As a full-service web design and SEO company in Omaha, we specialize in developing effective strategies to make our clients more visible to potential clients. If you want a partner for quality content creation, web design and SEO, give Big Red SEO a call today at (402) 522-6468!
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