Saturday, August 2, 2008

Writing Good Sticky Content


I get a ton of emails and private messages asking about what I do as far as content goes. The best content is of course original and unique to the web. Content or articles must be related to your site or overall theme and must be natural sounding. Too many times I see people using content spinners or niche store writing programs that are just plain and simply awful. The time it takes to correct that mess can be used to bang out 500 words on your own. You need to be writing for people first, not the search engines. If your site where to ever get manually reviewed, it would be dropped in a heart beat.

Try to write it short complete paragraphs and try not to run on sentences. Now I am now English major by no means, but my writing has gotten better over time. I still farm out a lot of work to Need An Article, but that content I usually end up tossing to the Ezines. The content on your own site needs to be yours or highly approved and proofed by you. Especially if someone else wrote it for you. I like to write as if it was coming out of my mouth. Even with my blog post I find myself talking out load as I type my post.

Stay far far away from duplicate content or just copying an ezine article or wiki page. While it looks good and filling on your site, you will not see the benefits from search engines. If you must use it, only copy the first sentence or two and then link straight out to the article itself. Google and other SERPs are getting much better with finding duplicated or stuff spun closely to the original.

Using Latent Semantic Content really helps lend relevancy to your overall theme. Make sure you use words that are closely related or identifiable with your niche. If you have a site about the Boston Celtics, you would of course use words like basketball, NBA, Massachusetts, Kevin Garnett and Doc Rivers. These words are all closely related to Boston Celtics and are LSI heavy.

I like to revert back to old lesson learned in school on writing short stories, use the Who, What, When, Why & How method. This method works fantastic for interior store pages. You can easy fill in 300 words of an individual store page using this method. Make sure to structure the content with the reader in mind.

On regular content pages, it depends on the particular niche I am writing for. One niche could have a ton of major companies related to it and you can slowly start writing pages on the history of a said company. You can also write about the history of a certain item in your niche as well. I always like to surf Wiki and do some research on the web if I am dealing with a niche I know nothing about. Read about 2 or 3 articles related to what you are writing about and then simply put it into your own words. Just make sure the information you provide is accurate and fact based.

If you are really stumped, head on down to your local public library, you remember those? Break out an older encyclopedia and Thomas Register books and research that way. Also there should be a ton of free books to look at related to your niche as well. I did this recently when I dropped my wife off to shop down town. The library was right around the corner and I hadn't been there in years. I made several photo copies of some pages to use for notes on content.

On sales pages, try to use call to action statements such as Buy Here or On Sale Now. Bold your keywords if you like, but do not do any unnecessary bolding for the sake of bolding. Bullet points are also good in pointing out several features, especially on store pages. Make sure you have keyword density, but do not sacrifice the quality of the article to achieve it. Density is playing less and less a factor in the SERP rankings. Keywords should not be repeated more than 4-6 times per 350 words.

Make sure your title is keyword phrase related for that page or article title if submitting off to ezines. Well though out keyword driven titles can really drive in the organic surfers, especially if backed up with great off page anchor text.

Writing good content just takes practice. I used to loathe writing, but it is integral in the online world. I still use Need An Article on many task, but I still write a lot of my own on site content as well. You will get better as you go, I promise. The better the content you have on site the more authoritative your site becomes. Authoritative content sites get linked to by others which over time builds better natural backlinks. Also good LSI relevant content does fantastic in pulling in organic search engine traffic. If you plan to drive your site to page one of Google, you better get to writing. Writing leads to more income, which is why I enjoy it so much now. My high school English teacher must be rolling in her grave.

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1 comments:

Don Mak on August 3, 2008 at 1:14 AM said...

I have been using the method you spoke of about dealing with a niche that has lots of corporations that deal in that niche and writing articles about the corporations as they relate to the niche. Works great.

There is also a gadget niche that I have been working in for awhile and it deals with a specific companies line of products and I have been writing full articles about each product and then deep linking into a BANS category.

My keyword rankings have continued to bubble towards the top of the rankings - and have never dropped since I adopted that method of writing content on those sites.

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