• Bruce Clay , Monday, September 8, 2008 12 PM

Good content is the "manna" of SEO--but how do you bake up that life-giving, nutritious bread to draw readers in? Lisa Barone offers some examples of good content for the readers tired of more vague descriptions.

So instead of saying "write interesting copy," she says "write something no one else has," and offers an example of just that. Comb through competitors' (and colleagues') sites to find angles that they haven't covered, products that they haven't reviewed or problems that they haven't been able to solve, and you have fodder for your next blog post or product page.

In the same vein, if you expose a problem or ask a question that no one has yet, you're likely to draw tons of traffic. Case in point, Rae Hoffman threw down the gauntlet about Twitter's suddenly no-following profile links (seemingly at Google's behest). "In the post, Rae sheds light on a problem that normal, non-Twitter-addicted folks may not have been aware of by explaining the situation and then offering her opinion as to what happened and why she was against it," Barone says. "Posts like these help keep search marketers in tune with [w]hat's happening around them and spark important debates."

Lastly, if you can be entertaining or even blunt (yet still insightful) you've likely got good content on your hands as well. "In most cases content won't be valuable on humor alone, but it's definitely one of those things that can make a strong piece of content even stronger," she says.

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