Search Engine Marketing Articles
Writing Content for Websites
Content is King! A fairly cheesy and commonly used expression, but it stands true for good web design.
There are many reasons for having good, quality content on your site (and by that I mean original, useful content); here are a couple of the main ones.
Your visitors
At the end of the day, whatever your motivations for setting up a website are, your visitors are the important ones. Far too few webmasters focus on their visitors (they’re to preoccupied with their stats, their affiliate programme income, their rankings in the search engines to name but a few).
If you want to design a quality site, then you have to think of your visitors .
The main reason for this is that your visitors are surfing the web looking for a website on a particular subject area, whatever this may be. When the come across your site they will firstly notice your design and layout, but that’s for another article.
They are looking for a particular piece of information and you need to have that available for them, or they’ll just go away!
When a visitor finds a good, useful piece of information, then they will leave your site happy that their search has been fruitful. Chances are that this isn’t going to be a one off search, so over time if you have useful, up to date content, then you can capture the repeat business of your visitors.
Your repeat visitors (or loyal customers to put it into a marketing focus) are the ones who will define your site and make you money (if that’s the business you’re in).
Keep it fresh
By adding information to your site on a regular basis, then your visitors are more likely to come back.
Look at it this way – you go to a site, have a look around and find what you want. Some time later, you go back looking for similar information – if nothing has been added since you previously visited the site then you most likely won’t go back, will you?
A point to remember is to highlight the new information so the visitor can find it easily. There is no point in adding to your site every day if you are going to hide the information in the depths of your site!
Also, there are benefits with regards the search engines, to having new content added on a regular basis.
Search Engines
For many sites, search engines are the main source
of traffic (notably Google).
The first benefit to lots of unique content is that the search engines
will eat it up like there is no tomorrow!
Your site’s ranking in the search engines is based on your content’s relevancy to particular keywords. So, if you have a particularly in-depth page on “web marketing”, then chances are that you will rank highly whenever someone searches for “web marketing”.
That is an over-simplification, but it is widely recognised the content is the main bearing on your search engine ranking. It makes sense if you think about it – the search engines are out to rank web pages in order of relevance to a users search, so it stands to reason that this will be largely based on content.
Also, by updating your site regularly, then the search engines will index your site more frequently (which means new content will be added to the search engines results sooner).
Most search engines index websites on a monthly basis (some less frequent, some more), but if they notice that your are adding new juicy content on a regular basis, then they will index your site on a more frequent regular basis.
This also makes sense if you think about it –
ideally search engines would like to index every site, every day (thereby
giving completely up to date relevant results to the user). But due to
the enormous quantity of websites out there, it is not practical to do
this.
So, the sites they index more frequently are the ones that update more
frequently.
One more point to note – most web marketers will
target one page per keyword, but there are many more obscure terms that
provide some traffic, but aren’t worth targeting.
The more content you have on your site, the more chance there is of your
pages being picked up on obscure searches.
For example, your “blue widget” page may be number 6 in the search engine results for the term “blue widget”, but it may also bring a few visitors searching for the term “information about blue widgets in the UK”. Therefore, the more content you have, the more unexpected visitors you will get!
Some tips about writing content for your site
- Good content is hard to write, there is no doubt about it. Try to get an idea in your head about who your average visitor will be (not a complete demographic breakdown, more an idea of why they will come to your site). Write your content around that.
- There is no harm in linking to other sites within your content. Although it means your visitor will leave your site, it also means that you will be giving them what they want and the chances are they will come back for more.
- If you find that you are linking to a particular site over and over again, ask yourself why. What to they have that you don’t offer? Then add that subject area of content to your site (do not copy their content – do your own content on that subject area).
- If you are running an information site, then chances are that content on the subject area isn’t a problem for you. If you are selling a product, then consider product reviews, alternate uses, history, etc.
- Remember to layout your content efficiently. There is no point in having the best content in the world if it is one big long paragraph. Split your content up into sections with headings and make full use of lists.
- The efficient use of formatting your text (ie not over doing it!) will help users pick out your key points easily. Most surfers skim pages until they find what they want so you should make it easy for them to see what your content is all about.
- Original content is best. It means you have a niche market and a unique selling point. But, most of us are running sites that have lots of competition so try to put a unique angle on your content (perspective, writing style, etc).
- Using content from other sites (with permission) is a good way of adding value and additional perspective to your site, but your original content should form the majority of your site (otherwise you will run the risk of duplicate content penalties from the search engines – and they are pretty strict about this!).
- The frequency at which you add content to your site will differ depending on your subject area. Try to get an idea of how often your average visitor would expect information to be updated. For example I would expect news websites to be updated every minute of every day, but I would expect an article based site to be updated at least once a week.
- Web marketing is no different from any other form of marketing – give your customer what they want!
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More SEM Articles
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- Writing content for websites
