If you’ve got a ton of content that originally appeared in offline publications, and would like to use it to create a content site, the thought of transferring that information for online display can be a daunting task.

But, don’t despair; there are ways to approach this project that can give your content site a boost in the search engines. In fact, you’re actually way ahead of the game, since you’ve got what most webmasters only dream of – tons of writing that you own copyright to, ready to plug into a site!

If you’re going for Google traffic, you probably don’t need to rewrite all your copy and your pages to “make them keyword rich.” That’s because your offline content is probably already keyword rich!  Google’s latent semantic indexing is getting smarter and smarter, which is good news if you’re transferring offline content to the online world.

Of course you must avoid doorway pages or pages that are just stuffed with links, and concentrate on what Google loves – REAL content. So get that content on your site, and then focus most of your effort on getting quality incoming links, from highly ranked sites – that’s the “Google way.”

Here’s an excellent formula that you should remember that will help you build solid SEO-friendly pages for either Google or Yahoo:

1. Keyword in page Title
2. Keyword in Heading 1
3. Keyword in Sub-Headings
4. Keyword in your Meta tags (like the page Description and image file names)

Then follow with a good amount of content on the page – at least 300 words. This makes a nice, SEO-friendly page, and you don’t have to go crazy worrying about exactly how many keywords you’ve got and where you put them.

Some people don’t realize that heavy keyword density isn’t as important as it once was. Yes, the content has to be relevant. But it doesn’t need to have the keyword poured into it at 11.23%. Too many people waste their time tweaking and tweaking their content to conform to some “magic” keyword ratios.

In fact, and this should make you breathe a sigh of relief, if you can convert your content to digital format – say by scanning it with OCR software – you can almost use it as is. If it’s 100% original content, that no one else on the web has used, that’s even better! Just build each page using the formula above, plug in your copy, and you’ll have a content rich site.