Guide to Writing Compelling Website Content Introduction - quality, relevant and compelling content is (indirectly) the most important factor in search engine optimisation. Don't just write content for search engines... write compelling content for your site visitors. Some useful tips are:- -
Be Obvious - you must tell the user what you think he wants to hear (based on your market research) as a users attention span when they hit your home page lasts for about 4 seconds before the click back in their browser and go on to the next one in the list. Therefore, use bullet points and simple sales messages or offers to summarise unique selling point sites. Remember, most web user skim websites until they decide they have landed on the site they want to learn more from. -
Keyword Diversity Site Wide - keep writing every day - it should never end!.. the more words, paragraphs, pages, chapters and topics you have on your site, the greater the number of potential key phrases you can optimise a webpage for. Massive sites with thousands of web pages will always rank high than a one page website... if the former has one million unique words on its site and the later just a thousand, its simple math to understand that one has a 1000 times greater change of ranking across all its words. -
Include Divisive Issues - the more unique, a topical, a contentious and opinionated your text, the more likely of search engines will rank it higher in the long term. Make sure you have a forum or blog to allow other to respond to your posts and opinion. Be careful you have a moderator function for your online discussion boards to prevent malicious comments or unrelated nonsense posted by comment spammers. -
Employ Consistent Writing Styles - try and use a newspaper style of writing which separates topics out on a page into paragraphs and uses, correct spelling and good use of grammar and English. If you use slang or jargon this reflects a more informal style of writing and may alienate some potential buyers. -
Content on Links Pages - if you have to have 'links only' pages, make them interesting for users (as opposed to just a reciprocal links directory) by adding some textual paragraphs. The last thing you want is for search engines to assume you are a link farm (because you have built loads of links only pages and no meaningful user content). Similarly, if you have very little words on a webpage, Google is likely to only present a result back to that page in its Supplemental Results. By adding content to a links page, this will have the affect of attracting more webmasters to those pages and the number of requests to link to you will increase. -
Outsourcing Sale Copy Writing? - this is risky but can be useful if you're stuck generating new ideas. Its risky because you don't know if text written for you has simply been copied from other sites. So be very suspicious of SEO companies claims for expert editors. You should know your unique selling points the best, so is always best to write your own website. Look at the topics and issues discussed by your top 10 competitors to see how they describe themselves and their offerings.. For instance, there may a common theme or issue. Content Management Systems - if designing and maintaining a large site with thousands of pages its likely you will needs some form of content management system. This should give you the ability to assign roles and authentication rights to certain users in your group, categorise pages into folders and topics, track and monitor the inter-relationship between pages and most importantly post content into a database driven website. |