A lot of my work involves advising clients on website content, and from a personal perspective I write a lot of content about website design and graphic design. So good consistent content is always something I have to think about.
Primarily I am hired to design and construct a website but most often than not I have a lot to do with regards to the final content for the website. This is not a gripe of mine as I actually enjoy being a part of creating the content for my clients, but nearly every time I have the same conversation regarding the quality, keyword content and most importantly the length and amount of content with my clients.
I understand that not everybody is a budding Wordsworth or Shakespeare and that writing content for a website is akin to pulling teeth; however, it is essential, not only for Search Engine Optimisation but for the general look and feel of your website. A Website designer can create the most amazing looking website for their client, but it all falls apart because of a lack of content. A great design no longer looks great with gaping holes where article text should be or with lower resolution images standing out like a sore, grainy thumb.
Now as I mentioned before, you don’t need to be an award winning author to write good website content, just a solid plan, a passion for what you do and a bit of hard work. Most articles or blog entries can be broken down into sections, much like you used to write up a science experiment in school, and then you just fill in the blank areas in manageable bite size chunks. I usually start with an introduction to raise a premise for an argument or opinion, then follows my reasoning and arguments for the statements, pros and cons etc, followed by a summary and conclusion. Stick a few high resolution pictures in and your done, it’s as easy as that.
Time and after time I get passed blog and article content that is based around a great idea, but only contains a few hundred words. Now as I have talked about before, Google and the other search engines love content, but what you may not know is that if your content is to short, Google will not love you so much. This is because Google looks not only for key words but for relevancy to the key word search; ergo, you may have used your key words in your article but because its only 150 words long, Google thinks that you don’t know very much about that particular topic and puts you to the bottom of the search pile.
“That’s a bit mean” you may be thinking, but think about it again. If you had a so called expert come to your business to talk about a topic that they claim to specialise in, and then their speech lasted five minutes, what would think? Exactly, that the person did not know what they were talking about, and this is the same with your website content. You must, and I can’t stress this enough, must write a minimum of 500 words in your articles to even stand a chance at it playing well with the search engines. If I write about website design or graphic design, I make sure I have a minimum of 500 words on website design or graphic design, well written and presented.
If you put in a little work with planning your articles, making sure your images are good quality and are named correctly ( and that’s a blog article topic for the future ) and you have written a good amount of content on your chosen topic, then you will quickly find that your website not only looks better, but performs better for your business.
Yak Out ( and off to write some more graphic design articles! )
N.B. Hang on how many words are in this article????