Content Writing Advice Article #1

May 13, 2008 Leave a comment

Back to basics:

It’s been a while since I went back to the fundamentals on my blog and talked about certain principles of content writing that I find to be fundamental advice for every site builder to follow.

Be Centered:

Kung Fu is about finding your center…I just have very large center- Sammo Hung

Like kung fu, your website is something that should be built over time, with patience and dedication. Find that central theme to keep your site tied together and keep practicing the fundamentals. Use your header tags properly, create proper meta titles and descriptions, and actually use your keywords correctly in context on the page.

Filed under Content, content writing advice, Search engine optimization Tagged with ,

Making Content Count – Blog Vs. Website

February 16, 2008 1 Comment

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.

Filed under Content, content writing advice, Search engine optimization

Content Without Purpose

February 1, 2008 3 Comments

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.

Filed under Content, content writing advice, Search engine advice Tagged with

How does your content rank?

September 24, 2007 1 Comment


What’s in Your Top 100?

Google recently modified it’s webmaster tools interface to be more user friendly and convey more information about how Google ranks your site. The best part of this is that Google now displays a list of the top 100 keywords, in order of importance on your site. This allows you to see what words Googlebot understands to be the most important words on your site, and that will directly affect your likelihood of being placed in a keyword search for that term. Obviously, if your primary keyword was intended to be, “content writing”, and it either doesn’t show up on that list or is number 99, you need to take a closer look at your content.

Common sense and Googlebot

So Googlebot reads over you page and your keyword is not in your top 10 keywords, what am I not doing right? Well, you should sit down and actually read through the content on your site as if you were coming to your site from a Google search. Now obviously, if you were searching for “content writing advice”, you’d expect that the site that you arrive at actually uses that word in several contexts. On the other hand, you don’t want to end up on a page that just full of that one word, spammed dozens of times across the page. You want to reach a good “Keyword Density“, that isn’t too spammy, but also reflects well when Google reads the page. Just use common sense, and you’ll get your keywords ranking in the order that will best benefit you and your placement.

Filed under Content, content on google searches, webmaster tools

First Post- Content, Content, Content

September 14, 2007 Leave a comment

Howdy Folks!

Thanks for tuning in! I am a Customer Support Supervisor for a large web hosting and design company in the real estate industry. Every day I see the winners, and losers of the industry. I see well built websites, I see stock websites that haven’t been modified from their default content. Day in and day out I talk to beginning website users completely lost and bewildered by all of the conflicting information out there about how to make your website visible to the search engines.
Over time I began to realize that there are always some “sneaky” things you can try to slip past the search engines, but they always catch up, and setup penalties for such actions. As Gollum from Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” would say “Nasty, Tricksy, False!”
Getting good rankings comes from understanding what search engines product is that they sell. They sell results. or rather, accurate results. They profit when people find what they are looking for, because that will increase the likelihood that the user will stay on the search longer, and eventually utilize the built in advertising. I know this is of course a simplification, but the basic idea is that search engines need to display results that match the “keywords” that a user inputs. So then logically, all you need to do is provide content that matches those keywords, and you’ll get recognized.
Easier said than done.
There you are, your homepage open….a huge overwhelming blank space. My goal is to provide you with tips, tricks and ideas to help fill in that blank page with valuable, search engine, and user friendly content.
Thanks for stopping by, and
you stay classy…internet.

Filed under Content, Search engine advice

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