Everyone in SEO knows that great ‘content is king’. As an SEO company in Bournemouth that has to deal with a variety of smaller clients paying for our SEO time, keeping abreast of what content to create is a challenge. Here is a Guide to using the latest Google Reader to analyse and generate good content.

A Simplified version of our content creation process

Before being able to create great content you need to understand the content that works in your chosen field. But to just Google for these terms then read all the pages wouldn’t be an economical use of time. You need to understand your field and find out what’s happening in it:

Google Reader

Google Reader is a great way to pull together your data in an easy to use way. This can involve blog posts, twitter feeds, news pages and web pages into an easy to digest feed. Here’s how to set one up:

For the purpose of this I’m going to set up content analysis for “Spa Breaks For 2”

1. Set up a Google Reader account

2.Go to Google Alerts. Type in the term you want to analyse, for the purpose of this demo I’m going to use “Spa Breaks for 2″

Make sure to change the Deliver To: field from your email address to Feed. Click Create Alert. This will take you to the below screen.

Click Create A New Alert. Do this for however many variations or keywords you’d like. All these results will be put directly into your Google Reader feed.

3. Go back to Google Reader

From here you now have access to those subscriptions. Which will be constantly updated with the latest info on your search query.

4. Add a Twitter Feed
Twitter is a valuable source of keeping up to the latest info on a subject and although Twitter do not have a direct feed any more the URL for it still works. So go to:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=[your term]

This will then populate a page with data. Simply copy the URL and paste this into Google Reader (see below). Click Add

5. Group These Together

If you are managing various different content research campaigns it can get a little overwhelming, by grouping these together it makes it more manage-able whilst allowing you to create bundles. Under Subscriptions hover over one of your Google Alert or Twitter feeds and click the small down arrow.  Then select new folder:

Create a name for this content research. Then simply drag and drop all your related alerts into one folder.

You now have a folder of all the latest content; webpages, news, blogs and twitter being constantly updated with the latest and best content. This is content Google recognises for this term, therefore this will give you a good understanding of the content to create.

**For those Geeks who want to do a little more with their content. Here’s something else you can do**

Firstly Find your newly created folder. Then click the down arrow next to it and select Create a Bundle see below.

This will take you to a bundle of all your reader feeds. Click the Add a Link button. This will take you to a Url of your bundle.

Copy the Url and go to Wordle.net. Paste your Url into the below field:

Click Submit to get an instant visualisation of the most common words that people are mentioning in your chosen subject.