Guide to Preparing Great Website Content |
| Monday, 19 May 2008 | |
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Having good website content differentiates your business greatly from your competitors. The web is filled with plenty of stale, duplicated content. If you can generate good quality, original web content, it equals to spending thousands of dollars on advertising. Having good content helps to generate sales leads as well. For eCommerce store, your sales copy is also your salesman. The words tell your customes directly about your products or services. Generally, good website copy portrays a professional business. If your business operates at the global level, a good sales copy is a must. Below are various types of content of a typical website: 1) Basic information about the business - a) Products/services information - Normally, such information should be present on most commercial organization websites. This can be in the form of eCatalogue. Products can be virtual or physical, which includes pricing for individual items as well. b) Corporate information - Your customers will want to know more about your business, especially new, potential customers that are likely to buy from you. Some companies like to publish information about key personnels of the company, such as the founder as well. c) Contact details - Some websites do not display phone numbers. In our opinion, websites should always display phone numbers. This tells your customers that you are always around to stand behind and support the services or products that you are selling. Unless the items that you are selling cost only a couple of dollars or you are dealing with a very large consumer base, you should always display a contact number on the contact page. Also, having a website contact form will help. Some customers may not use email address and website contact form is convenient for them to leave a message for you. Using website contact form, you may also track the number of enquiries that are generated from the website. 2) Writing Guides, Tutorials, How to Articles If you want to position yourself and stand out of the competition, you may publish more information about the services/products that you are offering. For example, a piano teacher providing music lessons may write about piano maintenance articles to show that he/she is a piano expert. Search engines and human visitors like such content, for obvious reasons. Your readers receive free expert advice, instead of patronizing the book store. 3) Web Blog Most importantly, web blogs humanize your business. Blogs are popular on the world wide web and easily understood by readers. Again, search engines like such fresh content. Writing blogs is also much easier than writing other form of content. Since blogs are generated directly from your mind, you may write in simple style with easy, short sentences. 4) Corporate News Normally, news are more suitable for big companies. News can be mergers, acquisitions, product innovations, inventions, opening of new offices and more. So, we do agree that small companies have lesser news to tell the world. But news are great resources online too. So if you have something exciting to tell the world, its also good to publish such information online. Again, search engines love such content too. Online writing style: Unlike writing for the print, online visitors read differently. According to research, online readers tend to scan information instead of scrutinizing every single word that you have to say. Here are some tips to publish your content effectively in the virtual world: 1) Use Formating: Headings, Sub headings, bullets, lists Sitting in front of the computer too long may cause discomfort. So, online visitors want information fast. You should organize your content carefully to provide what the visitors want immediately. They come to your website for a reason: Either to learn something or to be entertained. If you are not entertaining and not helpful, they leave immediately. Using proper headings and lists help your visitors to digest the information in seconds. Nobody likes to read a whole chunk of words which cannot be easily understood. 2) DO NOT write like an English Professor Bear in mind that they are not your college students. Many online visitors are not highly educated. They want to understand what you want to say, and what you want to sell. If you write long sentences which make it difficult for readers to digest, your visitors won't like it and they will close the browser window, hit the back button and go to your competitors' sites. Having short, simple sentences allows your visitors to understand you immediately. 3) Proper Use of Keywords Search engines are responsible for more than 80% of online traffic, and searching is the next popular online activity after email. Since search engines use keywords to identify websites, you should use sufficient keywords in your content so that your web pages can be easily searchable. Having good quality website content is primarily important. But having content that can be highly visible online is even better. A word of caution here: Do not stuff your web pages with too many keywords, your website may be penalized by the search engines. 4) BE ORIGINAL Its really not useful if you try to copy content from your competitors. This is inethical as well. Websites with duplicate content are often penalized and blacklisted by the search engines, and hence lower search ranking. Your visitors want something fresh, not something that they can find from so many other sites. Additional Tips and Advice It takes a lot of effort to prepare good quality content. However, its not all. Here are guidelines on how you can improve your website and protect your content: 1) Site navigation structure and design Having good content alone is not enough. You need to discuss with your website designer on how you can improve the accessiblity of the website. Navigation structure should be consistent so that your visitors won't be lost. 2) Walk through the website in your visitors's shoes You may be surprised on how this can generate many thoughts, when you navigate through the website and think like one of the visitors. There will be much room for improvements to address your visitors' needs when you think like one of them. 3) Proofreading is a must No grammatical or spelling mistakes please. This is something simple and should not be overlooked. Sites with minimal spelling mistakes attain higher SERP as well. 4) Protect your Content When you have very good content and your website becomes immensely popular, its natural that someone out there will actually steal your conntent. We suggest the following: a) To check who has stolen or if you have accidentally stolen someone's content. visit www.copyscape.com to check for duplicate content. b) Include a terms of use page, indicating that your content should not be stolen or abused in one way or another. c) At the bottom of every page, put something like Copyright © 2004 - 2008. 2004 indicates the year that the website is first published online. More resources: |
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