Writing Content for Your Website

Writing Good Content is Good Business

If you want to have a viable, long lasting website that ranks well with the search engines, then you will need lots of good content. 

Good content is not only good for attracting visitors and building a trusting relationship with them, but the search engines require it.  For several years, people have been putting up thousands of websites that had low grade content, and sometimes it was just plain junk, all for the purpose of trying to fool the search engines into believing that they had a quality website that the search engines should send visitors to. 

But the search engines have gotten smarter.  Especially Google.  Now Google requires good and unique content or your search ranking will suffer.

Here's an excerpt from Google's Terms and Conditions for people using Google's Adwords to advertise their website or product:  "Provide substantial information. If your ad does link to a page consisting mostly of ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional, unique content."

But keep in mind, your should be writing for people, not for search engines.  You want to give your visitors a reason to stay at your site and a good reason to return and this means not only lots of good content, but fresh content  that you add on a regular basis.

Writing content can easily become something you quickly tire of.  One of the best ways to be excited about writing content is to write about a subject that you like, know a lot about and are excited about.  And if this is the case, then you will be the best person to write about the subject matter.

Write Your Content for the Average Person

Don't Use Technical Terms or Web Jargon .  The point of most Websites is to inform visitors about what you have,  what you do or what you are interested int.  The last thing you want to do is turn off your visitors by speaking in terms and phrases that they don't understand. 

There are some Web savvy people on the Internet who will be able to absorb this kind of talk, but the majority of people who surf the Web are average people looking for information and they want it Quick and Simple.

If you have a business, neither do you want to use Marketing Lingo and Buzzwords.  Most of the people who visit your website are not going to be your competition, but will be customers, or potential customers, so they won't understand this kind of talk.  Try and be as clear as possible.

Provide information, not puffery and in-your-face advertising, just tell your visitors what you do.

  Be Honest with Your Content

Avoid using content that makes your information or your product or business sound too good to be true.  Yes, you want to increase your traffic and/or sell your products and services, but when you boast and brag more than you inform, most people will be skeptical of what you have.  If they feel they are getting the hard sell, it's too easy to just leave the site.  Some people will bite on this kind of bait, but you will turn off many potential customers. 

You want your visitors to feel comfortable and welcome, so use your content to achieve this and to simply tell them the facts, not a big fish story.

One sure way to irritate a customer is with pricing secrecy. Don't make a customer fill out a form to find out how much something on your website costs. You'd be annoyed if you walked into a grocery store and had to fill out a form just to find out how much a loaf of bread costs.

If you have a business or service where you must develop a quote in order to give a price to a customer, then you can't publish a price list.  But you can set up a page that calculates several variables and gives rough estimates or  have a page listing some of the jobs you have completed and the costs.  Customers want quick information, so give them as much as you can.  Don't give them the impression that you are hiding something from them.  If you want to gain their business, you should work on gaining their trust.

Encourage Return Visits by Keeping Your Content Fresh

• Encourage return visits by having updateable sections like a "News Page", a "Guest Page", "Customer Contributions", "New people in your organization" or a "What's New?" section.
• If your content isn't updated regularly, once a visitor has seen your site, there is no reason for them to come back.
• If your business caters to a particular interest group (musicians, movie buffs, sportsmen, collectors, hobbyists, investors, etc.) consider having a Community Section, Chat Room, FAQ page and/or Blog on your site.
• If you have a Chat Room, be sure it is supervised.  Use a moderator who approves all the submissions beforehand. This avoids spam, foul language, potential security breaches, and other problems.
• When you add hyperlinks to external sites, open the pages in a new window so your visitors don't leave your site.

Article Directories and Link Building

As you probably know, Google software engineers constantly change the way Google ranks websites. And these days, it is absolutely a necessity to get lots of high quality links to your website if you want to rank well with the search engines.

You can trade links with other websites to get their links pointing back to your website, but getting reciprocal links is a time consuming process.  I cover the subject of reciprocal link building in my topic on Link Building for Search Engine Optimization.

But, even better than reciprocal links, is getting one-way links pointing to your website.  One-way links will greatly help your site's ranking with the search engines and the more you have, the better will be your search engine ranking.

One of the quickest ways to get one-way links to your site is to submit articles to Article Directories.  You get backlinks to your website by including a backlink to your site in the bio of your article.

When doing this be sure to optimize the backlink for the keyword for which you are trying to rank well.   For example if your site is about "Improving your Golf Swing" and one of your keyword phrases is "Golf Club Buying Tips", then somewhere in your article you will want to have a link pointing back to your web page and the text name of this link (this is the text that people will see and will click on) will be "Golf Club Buying Tips".

There are also automated article submission services that you can use to speed up your article submission process.  This will also give you the maximum coverage possible for your article in the least amount of time.

www.submityourarticle.com is a very good service if you are time limited and willing to pay for a service.

A Great Article Submission Tool

Article Submitter

Now, if you don't have a lot of time to spend trying to submit articles to article directories and you don't have a lot of money to spend on an article submission service, there is a GREAT tool that you can use to submit articles to thousands of article directories.

This tool is called "Article Submitter". It allows you to quickly submit your web articles to hundreds of article directories with just a few mouse clicks!  It's that easy!

It can save you many hours of time in both submitting articles AND in finding article directories.

Here's a few quick facts about Article Submitter

1. Quickly publish your articles to over 660 Article directories!
2. Increase your Google rankings by getting quality, onw-way links!
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4. Free upgrades for life!
5. And best of all, the basic version of Article Submitter if FREE!
   Then if you like it, you can pay to upgrade to the GOLD version.

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As you can see, the pages of this website are not surrounded with tons of advertisements because I'm not going to try and sell you a bunch of stuff that you do not need. I only recommend quality products, no junk, no scams.  All of the products that I recommend, I have bought myself and I use them.  If they cost something, then they are well worth your money, otherwise I would not recommend them.

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