Search Engine Marketing Spot

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Today’s Spot On Tip revolves around writing better content for your websites. A common phrase you have probably read or heard about is “content is king”. Here I will list a few steps that should help you get towards your end goal of having quality content that is laid out properly on your sites. One thing to remember is it’s not just what you say, it is how you say it and how you present it to your readers that will make it “king”.

Unique Information – This is tricky for a lot of people, not everyone is a professional writer or has the ability to come up with there own content on the fly. To give yourself more ideas, you need to read more. Stumble, Digg, Sphinn, your favorite forums or even just flip through the SERP’s to give yourself ideas for your next great article or website topic. You could even ask a question in your subject or page heading and then post your own informative answer. By reading more, you should be able to get more ideas to write about.

Research – Unless you are an expert on the topic, you should always research what it is you are writing about or referring to in your content. One of the worst things you can do is make yourself try and stand out with a great story, just to find out you had mis-informed the readers. You now are standing out, as a sore thumb because the readers will more then likely let you know where you were wrong. This is where research comes into play, make sure you have your facts right before making your site content go live. People would rather read well informed content, this is what will make them come back and read more.

Readability – Not everyone actually reads your entire content, some people simply scan the content until something stands out to them or they find what interests them the most. This is why your content layout is very important and you make it easier to for the readers. Separate different areas what you write with paragraphs and ensure if the next paragraph is a different topic that you highlight that for the readers. Here I have broken down each paragraph, made the paragraph topic bold so anyone scanning can easily see the steps I am referring to from my subject line.

Grammar/Spelling – I am not a professional writer and I will be the first to admit I have a hard time with this one here. However try your hardest to make sure you use proper grammar and always spell check your content. You can lose loyalty to your website if the content does not read properly or has obvious misspelled words all over the place.

Passion – Always try and instill passion in what you write, make your points stand out and state your information. Readers will pick up on that passion for what it is you are writing about and they will be hungry to read more of your content. I like to refer back to your science teacher, he/she used the same mono tone voice in there lecture and going over notes put you to sleep. Imagine if you had a science teacher that had passion each and every day while lecturing you, I bet more people would pay attention. The same concept goes when you write your content. A good example would be Andy Beard’s Blog. He shows his passion in almost every post he makes, which is why people go back each day to see what new things he has written about.

I cannot promise you that by following these 5 steps that you will make the front pages of every major social media site out there. I hope though that by using these 5 steps as a foundation to your content writing, that it will give you a better understanding of where to start.

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.