Foot In Mouth Disease, Content Writing for the People

Let your visitors know whats important

When website visitors (and search engines) arrive on your page, they are going to immediately try to assess the most important topics on the page, and if they match up with what they are looking for, they will continue reading your text. The best advice I can give you for writing your content is to use your header tags properly. Most web editors will let you enter these header tags, but you may need to switch over to your source code to add the tags properly.

Determine the what topics your page covers

At the top of your page, make sure your primary topic is set in an h1 tag, it is ok to adjust your css to compensate for the larger size it will make that text by default. As you write the rest of your page, break up your sub-categories by applying h2 and h3 tags to them so that those titles describe the content visually and make it easy for the site visitor to digest the different topics that you are discussing. Of course, your page content should all reflect your primary topic in some way, putting completely different topics on the same page makes it difficult for both visitors and search engines to determine what you are relevant to.

I wanted to get a discussion going about this topic, because I think it could be really important for site owners. Blogs are a great way to get lots of fresh content out on a daily basis through an easy medium. However, the more time you spend blogging, the less content writing you do for your website. Editing your site pages definitely takes more consideration, as you have to consider layout, presentation, and call to action on every page you add (or at least you should be!)

So the question is, blog or write for your site?

- Side question, if you do have your blog as PART of your site, like blog.soandso.com, does the weight of the content added there get valued towards your overall value? I believe it may, but I think it’s a good question to put out there.

When you are content writing for you site, you do need to keep in mind the user freindliness of your website. I read this great article about usability that gave an analogy of a restaurant that did tons of advertising but didn’t reap the benefits because their restaurant wasn’t quality.  

Write the content for your website in a way that is going to satisfy the people who read it. Filling pages with empty words that happen to match with your keywords will be much less successful than useful information that is relevant to your clients needs. 

Don’t focus on your rankings because you will become obsessed, checking other peoples sites and wondering why they are ranking higher. Take that energy and devote it to writing relevant website content! When you have quality information that converts visitors it is far more valuable than just sheer numbers.