Would your own website content interest you enough to read more? After all, the main point of having content is to capture attention and lead your reader to follow your call to action. Right? So what can you do (besides hire me)?
First off, be relevant to your intended readers.
If you write a gardening blog, then a post about rebuilding the carburetor on your string trimmer probably won’t be widely read. Write about planting the Three Sisters instead. Give a short history of the practice of sowing corn, beans and squash together. Then elaborate on why it’s a brilliant idea, and include a couple of photos of your own garden. Hopefully it’s thriving and productive, adding to your audience’s interest in growing their own Three Sisters.
Use a conversational tone.
Remember when you were in school, forced to listen to the teacher every day? She stood up in front of your class and lectured on the subject of the day. There was hardly any interaction with you, her class. She said it, and it was gospel, no explanations. Take it or leave it. Thinking back on my own high school experience, that was probably why I almost failed geometry.
Make your text easy to read.
Make the effort to use proper spelling and grammar. Know when and why to use to, too and two, or their, there and they’re. Nothing tags you quicker as an ignorant boob than sloppy usage in your writing. Yes, it is my soapbox issue. Maybe that’s because our ninth grade English teacher taught us how to diagram a sentence, and it’s still with me. Thank you, Miss Monroe!
When you’re tempted to make a paragraph out of one sentence, break it up into five or six shorter statements. If you must get technical, then please, please, please use terms that your readers can all understand. Define the jargon for them so they don’t have to go to extra work to figure it out. Why? Because most people won’t.
Website content is far more than just writing. Add photos, videos, graphics or podcasts to break up the river of words. But it all qualifies as ‘content’. And it’s all very important, so treat it like the royalty it is.
Write with SEO in mind.
Ah, now we get to the real reason for this post! Do your keyword research and write with the results in mind. What words do people use in a search for the subject of your post? How do they phrase them? What are the alternate terms? Weave those into your content as you create it or go back and rewrite a bit to include them. Further, investigate your competition’s content. What keywords are they using? Are those different from yours? Maybe you can use the same keywords, if it makes sense to do that.
There’s a school of thought that insists that more is better. More keywords, longer keywords, longer posts, bigger, better, faster, more. Stop. Just stop. If you write on and on about a subject, your content can easily be divided into two or three posts. Keep the length around 700-1000 words, for the sake of keeping your readers’ attention. You can go shorter, but down around 300 words the crawl spiders aren’t very interested. They’ll think you’ve put them on a diet.
And remember: Keyword stuffing is the devil!
Give me a shout for help with your website content. If you need content writing or editing, that’s available too!