29 May 2012

Great content Blog!

Original Blog Posted: 29 May 2012

Why is Fresh and Original Content Important?
If you read through any blog or article about website optimisation, online marketing or Seach Engine rankings you will see time and time again that ‘regular updates’ or ‘fresh content’ is mentioned as the key to achieving and maintaining your top ranking position for your business website. But why exactly is this? What are the tips and tricks to use when writing your content? How much content is enough and how much is too much? We thought it was our duty to provide you with a comprehensive guide to the whys and hows of writing fresh, original and quality content for your website and to explode some myths along the way. We will also look at how to get the most out of your website content once it is written.

Fresh Content for Visitors
The key thing to remember when creating your website is your visitors and how you will encourage them to return to your website again and again. Take an online store. Of course, adding new products to your lines is very important but what makes a customer choose to buy a new product from you rather than one of your competitors? Well, probably the one thing that makes you return to your favourite high street shops when you go out and buy goods, sound advice and product know-how from the staff on the shop floor.

Having an online store without useful product reviews, hints and tips and articles is the equivalent of going into a major retailer and having a question about the new television you want to buy met with a shrug of the shoulders and a ‘dunno’ from the sales assistant. We have probably all had this experience in the past and know how off putting it can be.

So, how do you avoid being that sales assistant and demonstrate that you have all the product knowledge required to advise your online customers about their purchase? Well, we would certainly advise that you write a review of each new product you stock and make sure your product descriptions are thorough and accurate. For example, the new television you have in your range, does it have HDMI sockets? If so, how many? Is it full HD? Does it have a built in Freeview tuner? Don’t make your customers go elsewhere to find this information and hope they come back because they won’t.

You can go further than this though by writing reviews and ‘road tests’ of your new product ranges. Why not compare three HD televisions and write an article about it or even advise your customers on the best way to set up their new television in their living room to get the most out of it? You could even make a YouTube video demonstrating the features of the television and post it on your website. It is this level of detail that will make your online store stand out from the crowd and keep customers coming back to you.

Remember that just because you are online it doesn’t mean you can ignore good customer service!

Fresh Content for Search Engines
Search Engines love fresh content. Their ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’ crawl the web looking for new pages and content and you will be amazed how much difference a new article or blog post can make to your rankings. Remember that you are competing for your search engine ranking and it is not a given that your website will appear in even the first ten pages of a Google Search just because you want it to.

Your competitors will all be writing fresh content for their websites and the Search Engines will know this. If the last update was made to your website six months ago then you will eventually drop below the website that has content added every week. Lack of regular updates will make your website appear less relevant to Search Engine results very quickly and this can be the demise of any online business.

If you leave a website to get stagnant then the regularity with which your website is ‘crawled’ will drop dramatically and, soon enough, the investment you made in your website when it was first built becomes dead money.

Why Does Content Have to be Original?
When being faced with the daunting task of creating fresh website content on a regular basis it is tempting to copy and paste content from other people’s websites. Back to our television again, why should you write a compelling review of the new HD television when there are twenty others already online? Why shouldn’t you just copy what they have done? Afterall, that content will be fresh to your website.

Well, Search Engines know all about duplicate content. In fact this warning appears on the Google Webmaster pages;
“In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.”

What you are doing may be in all innocence but wrecking your rankings in this way can be very frustrating indeed, especially if your website gets removed from the index.
Of course you cannot discount that you may also be infringing copyright by copying someone else’s content. This can have serious legal ramifications for your website or business if you are caught and prosecuted.

Tips for Maximising Your Content
So we guess we have laboured the point about why fresh content is important to your website but what about some tips to get the most out of the content you have written?
1. Make sure your website can have new content and pages added easily. This is where a CMS (Content Management System) website can be very valuable. You will want to be able to add content yourself and not have to pay your web designer every time you want an update.

2. Update regularly. Keep up-to-date with your industry yourself. If you own a technology web store then read publications such as T3 or watch The Gadget Show whenever you can to get ideas about new articles or features to write about.

3. Keep it relevant and interesting. It isn’t easy writing articles or blog posts so maybe look online for some hints and tips about article writing or maybe even consider a college or distance learning course. Reduce the risks of losing your audience by breaking your content into bite-sized chunks or paragraphs.

4. Proof read everything. How something is written is as important as writing it in the first place. Poor grammar or spelling can give the wrong impression about your website.

5. Link your keywords. You will know what keywords are important to your business so emphasise these with a link to a main landing page on your website. For instance, writing an article about the new range of 3D televisions available could include the phrase ‘brand new 3D TVs on the market’. If this phrase is linked back to your page of the 3D TVs you have in stock it can highlight to Search Engines that these keywords and that page are important. Your pages should act like a spider’s web with all of the strands pointing to the pages that will actually make you some income.

6. There is such a thing as too much content. For a regular website a page or two of new content a week should be plenty. Make sure you get your best and most relevant material noticed by not ‘crowding it out’ with content for the sake of it.

7. Use social media. Encourage your readers to ‘Digg’, ‘Like’ or ‘Tweet’ your articles by making it really easy to do so. Including buttons for this on articles can be extremely valuable as when users read the article and click that they want to share it on Facebook a link will appear in their Facebook profile which will be visible to all their friends who may well visit as well.

8. Create links back to your website yourself. Don’t wait for your visitors to share how good your latest article is. Post it on social media and article sharing websites straight away.

Conclusion
Building and maintaining your online presence is hard work. Writing fresh content can be daunting and may be way down your priority list when you have so much else to do in a day but do try and generate interest in your website by offering customers what they want. Make the time to write articles, features and blogs for your website. Be the online expert in your field and encourage others to share the pages of your website and you’ll see the benefits much more quickly than you might think.
If you are in the Bristol area and would like any further help and advice about creating fresh content for your website then contact us at Yoto Creative.