Tips to Improve Your Online Rankings with Original Media Content

When using social media to engage potential customers and clients, businesses can feel a lot of pressure to just get information out there, rather than focusing on the quality of their content, or the originality. When a business creates informative and engaging content, they are creating media that can be linked back to. So here are some tips to help you create your own content, and reasons why you should.

Enhanced SEO Rankings

Using stock images in your blog posts is fine, but using your own images provides your readers the opportunity to use your image and link back, as well as enhancing the general quality of your presentation. When people use your image, they will link back to your site, creating a series of backlinks that can direct traffic to your blog from other places.

When uploading your own images to your blog posts, be sure to save the image with keywords in the file name so that this can increase your SEO rankings. Saving your image as “screenshot123” isn’t going to help your rankings, whereas utilizing keywords in file names as well as captions allows you to appear in image directories, which can help your blog to rank higher in search results.

Creative Control

If you use your own graphs and charts in your blog posts, as long as they are professional looking, it shows that you are committed to your information and your industry. It also gives you the creative control to create images that fit in with your blog layout, theme, and business brand.

Creating your own infographics allows you to display the exact information you want, and can provide you with useful business tools for sales and training, as well as for your online content. There are a lot of infographic creation tools out there, but Easelly and Piktochart are free and easy to use.

In addition, photography applications like Instagram and Flickr can help you to create and edit your own images. While using stock images is fine, taking your own pictures gives you creative control and shows that you are dedicated to producing your own personalized, professional content.

Developing New Skills

Although it might seem that producing your own media content is going to take more time out of your day, the chances are you’re already doing it for other aspects of your business. Building training videos and website images of your business requires the same set of creative skills as producing your own blog media, and building a reputation as a company that not only produces great written content, but also useful visual content, will increase your online visibility and reach. As predominantly visual social media platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram increase in popularity, getting your own visual content out there is key and can help you to create valuable backlinks.

Even simple efforts to produce visual content can go a long way, and starting a business Instagram that filters into your blog can create valuable visual content in a really simple way. As Instagram allows you to put filters on photos to adjust the colors, it is a simple tool that you can use to make your images very visually appealing, and there are many other picture applications and programs out there to help even the novice photographer produce great content.

As visual culture continues to grow, it is important for businesses to harness the power of images and videos for their blog and website content, so take some time to invest in producing your own content to create backlinks and increase your online visibility and reach.

Sources

Collins, Corrine. “Using Infographics to Increase Your Blog Reach.” 5GBFree Blog. http://www.5gbfree.com/blog/2013/05/01/how-infographics-can-increase-your-blog-reach/. (8 May, 2013).

King, Cindy. “21 Business Blogging Tips From the Pros.” Social Media Examiner. http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/blogging-tips-from-the-pros/. (8 May, 2013).

Luke, Ali. “26 Essentials for Blogging Success: What You Need to Know.” http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/26-essentials-for-blogging-success-what-you-need-to-know/. (8 May, 2013).