SEO Tips: Ideas for Creating Great Website and Blog Content
It is said over and over, “Content is King” for achieving top search rankings, but what exactly does that mean and how do you create great content. Here are some quick SEO tips for developing great content for your website or blog.
- Don’t Write What YOU Think They Want to Read:
Website owners and bloggers often create content based on internal assumptions of what they think their consumers or visitors want to read or should be interested in. It is vital that your content addresses topics useful and interesting to your primary audience and at an appropriate level for their consumption and understanding. Make sure you look at potential topics and the level it is written at from the perspective of your typical consumer, not your own internal view of how it should be or what they should want to know. - No Selling, Telling, Shouting, Screaming – No Hype Zone:
No one likes telemarketers and ditto for websites and blogs that SCREAM BUY NOW! Shouting and screaming self-proclaimed achievements, features and benefits about your amazing new product, how your company is number one, or the industry leader in… destroys any credibility your blog or website may develop. Content that is overtly selling and making huge claims makes visitors immediately suspicious. Likewise shallow content with a transparent cover to “sell” something is always detectible and will send visitors packing off to another site where they can find useful information. No matter how catchy the title or creative the pitch, people know when they’re being led down to the checkout cart, no matter how well disguised the tour guide is. - If You Think You the Information is Too Valuable, It’s Perfect:
Readers are looking for one thing when they come to a website: information. Readers do not want to read pages and pages of case studies that all brag about your Fortune 500 clients, nor how great youthink your services or products are – see #2 above.Many bloggers and content writers or owners are reluctant to reveal “too much” for fear of “giving away” their secrets. However, the information you may be clinging onto so tightly for fear of giving too much away – is likely the content that will drive traffic to your site.
For illustration’s sake, let’s say George has a legal consulting website. George regularly offers very useful, authoritative legal information and how-to’s in his website blog. Things like what to do or say, or not do or say, when questioned by law enforcement, or how to file certain complicated court forms or claims, and so on. When one of his loyal readers, who has never hired George before, needs serious legal consultation – is he or she going to scour his site for an article or blog regarding the situation, and say to himself, “Thanks for the free advice, George, now I don’t have to hire you”.. ? On the contrary – because George regularly provides helpful, inside advice about legal matters, he will not only gain trust, but he establishes himself as a leading authority in his profession.It’s as simple as this: the more unselfishly information is given away, the more readers and customers will instinctively trust you and your business or blog, and the more your business or blog will be seen as an authoritative source and a “good” business. - Unique Content:
It is vital that your blog posts and web page content is unique and not copied from somewhere else on your website or worse from another website! Duplicate content will get you penalized by Google and hurt your search results, Google assigns the top rank to the oldest content and penalizes the copycats. In addition, duplicate content from a site or source other than your own material is plagiarism and also could be a copyright violation, and can cause more serious problems than a dip in search results, so create your own stuff. - Keyword Stuffing – great idea, NOT really:
If you don’t know much about SEO, know this: SEO is not just about inserting a few keywords into a blog or webpage. Google does not base search results upon a magic number of keywords in website content. A few clever words, or repeating some keywords according to some magic SEO recipe, will not get your site or blog ranking. In fact there are over 240 factors used in the Google algorithm, no one knows the exact number and only about 50 factors have been reverse engineered by deduction; the algorithm itself is secret and as well guarded as the Coke recipe.Does stuffing or repeating keywords work? Stuffing content, forcing keywords into a post or page, creates unnatural content that is hard to read and follow. It is usually obvious to both readers and Google, and both will ignore content like this. The overall quality of content is more important to both readers and Google than the number of keywords used (look up the Panda updates if you think otherwise). - Page Content – at least 200 to 300 words:
Pages with very little content don’t provide much information to visitors, nor do they give much to the search engines to index and digest. Both Google and visitors view pages with minimal text content as having little value and poor quality/authority. Make sure your key pages, Homepage and second level pages at a minimum, have at least 200 to 300 words per page. - Make it Relevant:
Make sure the page content is relevant to both your overall website and it is focused on the topic for that page. The page title and content should relate to each other and be focused on a particular topic. It is better to have several highly focused pages than a few pages that are very general covering a wide range of topics, but not in detail. - Page and website Structure:
This is key to creating a high ranking website and page. We could write an entire blog on this one item alone. For now, we will leave it at; follow good design practices, make sure your title, description, H1 and H2, etc are done correctly and that all are relevant to the page content. Surprisingly this is one of the most overlooked aspects of on-site SEO. A webpage and website can look great, and be completely non-functional from an SEO standpoint.
We have met many that think that a great website, with great content; will eventually rank on its own. In a perfect world this may be true, but the fact is that the internet is highly competitive and if you rely strictly on the content on your website and in-house SEO skills your website will not be competitive. Your more aggressive and ambitious competitors certainly have SEO campaigns running and it is impossible to compete against well done SEO with website content alone and frankly, in-house teams can rarely compete against a good SEO professional team.
SEO is not something that can be learned overnight, there is much, much more to SEO than most realize. The best SEO tip is to hire a professional to either do your search engine optimization or advise your in-house webmaster and website team on how to optimize your website and blog.
