Five Ways to Use Your Expert Knowledge for SEO

Successfully marketing your business online all starts with making connections with the people that you meet there, and the point of all of the blogging and status updating is to try and start a conversation. It can be daunting trying to think of something to write for a blog or to post on Facebook, but that may just be because you are taking your best source of information for granted. Most professionals have a store of knowledge about their niche and their familiarity with it may make it seem too mundane for anyone to be interested in, but this is not the case. Content that contains expert knowledge is the most important factor in building good SEO and there are many ways that you can use that knowledge to build yours.

Your Website Content
The most important place to use your expert knowledge is on your business website. A corporate blog is the best place to publish articles that offer insights and information for your niche and is the foundation of all of your online marketing efforts. Because the search engines are continually looking for the freshest and most relevant information, a good blog on its own can generate excellent SEO.

Comments on Blogs and Social Media
Good content on its own is only the start of raising your page ranking in the SERPs and the other half of the equation is the links online that point to it. This is another opportunity to use your industry knowledge to engage in the conversations in your niche. Leaving helpful advice and informed opinions on other’s blogs or as a comment on a social media or niche forum thread creates a useful link while also raising your online professional profile.

Web 2.0 User Generated Content sites (UGC)
Sites like Hub Pages and Squidoo allow users to post informative articles that can be linked back to your website to create a link for the search engines. Often it is possible to repost your own blog posts on these sites, and because these sites are constantly adding information to their catalogue, the search engines crawl them regularly and give the links there a higher value. Adding information to a trusted site like Wikipedia is the best way to create back links that build SEO for your site.

Webinars and Podcasts
Live sharing of information online not only offers valuable information to people, but it also forms the most personal link possible on the Internet; direct face to face communication. Webinars and podcasts are an opportunity to literally have a conversation that uses your industry knowledge to directly market your business and its products to a willing audience. Your attendees also contribute to the content of these forms of communication and often this allows you to show your knowledge and experience in its best light. This gives the recorded podcasts even more value as a downloadable promotional tool later on.

E-Books
Most professionals could write a simple five or ten page book with informative content about something to do with their industry based on their own experience or trade knowledge. Not all books are written with the NY Times bestseller lists in mind, and most e-books are small publications written by professionals about things that are relevant to their industry. These e-books are usually free or given away as an enticement to opt-in on a squeeze page. They also can be given away for free on document libraries like Scribd and Doc Stoc which have a good reputation with the crawlers for having quality information and links to build SEO.