Writing Content for Your Website

Writing content for your website is an essential business strategy. Traffic flows to your website based on the content that’s on it. The first contact that many of your prospective clients and employers will have with you is your website. A polished website with solid content can foster great leads and keep prospects interested in learning more about your services. A poorly written website or one that contains sparse or little content can lead to a lack of confidence in clients who otherwise wanted to do business with you.  Follow these tips when writing content to present your services in the best light possible:

Quality Beats Low Prices

There’s a trend that’s heavily promoted by Internet marketers that has led to poor quality writing on websites. The advice given by the so-called experts is to hire writers for very low pay to generate a large amount of content on an ongoing basis. You get what you pay for, and in many cases, the content contains spelling and grammatical errors, does not translate well with an English speaking audience, offers little information and is difficult to read. Quality content will establish your credibility, expertise and brand in the online marketplace. When you’re thinking about writing content for your website, concentrate on quality. If you need to outsource it to freelance writers, make sure that you find ones that can deliver quality work. You’ll pay more, but you may earn more in sales as a result.

Learn SEO Techniques

Quality writing is one half of the equation. You need to compete with other websites that have similar content, and you can do that with effective search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.  There’s a lot of information on the web about SEO, from understanding what it is to how to use it for article writing. You can learn more about it from a blog post by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam Team.  What you need to remember is that one of the ways your clients and employers will find you online is by typing keywords in a search engine. If you can prepare relevant articles that contain those keywords in the body as well as in the titles, then your website has a better chance of appearing in the first couple of pages of the search results. Learn as much as you can about SEO techniques and article writing, because there are many other factors that you have to take into consideration to elevate your online presence.

Use Subheadings

Web surfers have little tolerance for lengthy articles that aren’t broken up. Readers want to glance through subheadings quickly to see whether your content is what they are looking for. When you’re writing content for your website, break up your text by using subheadings. It’s effective to use numbers, tips or brief titles for your subheadings. You should also refer to the AP Stylebook for how to title subheadings, because it’s the most common format used in article writing.

If you need help writing content for your website, or if you could use an extra set of eyes to review and improve it, then hire a freelance writer or editor. There are several online writing communities for freelance writers where you can post job ads. You can also search the web for writers or post an ad on Craigslist.com.

Resources:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-writing-useful-articles-that-readers-will-love/

http://www.apstylebook.com/