Content Is King – What is good content?
Once a decision has been made about a domain name, and you have an idea about what products to sell it’s a good idea to start adding content straight away.
The actual ecommerce part of the site may take many months to program, if you plan to do everything yourself things usually take twice as long as expected. While this is being sorted out you can write articles about your products, reviews, history, tutorials, any good content really.
Writing Good Content
- Original content is a must, don’t be tempted to copy things from other sites. Google penalises content which is copied, the site owner and their lawyers may have something to say about it too. You can use a site such as Copyscape to find out if your content has been copied.
- Make sure you check your copy for spelling and grammatical errors. If you use a system with no spell checking function, write content in a word processor first, or copy and paste it in afterwards to check it is correct. This not only makes a better experience for your readers. Search engines are starting to use correct spellings as part of their algorithms for ranking pages. “Did you mean to spell that correctly?”
- Produce content which is informative, useful, enjoyable to read, and not readily available elsewhere. This type of content is more likely to receive link backs, bookmarks, and encourage users to read more pages or return to the site in future.
- Content should be written with an awareness of SEO, you want people to find it in the first place. This shouldn’t lead to robotic keyword spamming though, this will turn off users and could lead to penalties with search engines.
- Break the pages into easily digestible parts. Most readers on the net scan pages, don’t fight this, help them out. Using sub headings, short paragraphs, lists and images make the page more interesting to read, easier to scan, and can help with SEO.
- Don’t make pages too long. It may be better in terms of SEO to have a page that takes 10 screens to scroll down but it is not good for the user experience. Break large pages into smaller ones and link each one to the next/previous page in the series.
- Linking to authority sites with related keywords in anchor text can improve the user experience and improve SEO. In effect you are telling search engines “This page is related to these other things”. The other sites may provide longer explanations of things you do not wish to cover in detail yourself.
- Make sure the titles and headings are related to the content you are writing about. Use same keywords in the title, headings, links and multiple place in main content for the best SEO results.
Read about international acoustic engineering
Posted by Tom on Thu 15th Jan 2009
