Date Published: 12-Feb-2013 | By: Lynda S White
Quality content on the business website is becoming more important than ever. Maintaining a customer-centric website with fresh and informative content not only helps businesses attract more visitors, but also enables search engines to give higher rankings. Businesses can also differentiate themselves from their competitors by offering high quality content for free.
Continuously producing quality content that has potential to attract visitors and links from other sites is not an easy task. It needs continuous effort, time, and above all, the ability to generate business content that engages and persuades your customers. Mentioned here are some key elements you need to consider to create compelling business content for your website.
Valuable content
The content on your website becomes valuable to your customers only when they find it useful. Therefore, apart from educating them about your products and services, try to provide valuable content. Now, what is valuable content? It may differ from business to business and customer to customer. But a thumb rule is to have content that is educational, informative, authoritative and engaging.
For instance, if you are an SEO service provider, educating your visitors on basics of SEO such as what SEO is, different marketing strategies used in SEO, benefits of using SEO, etc. will help new customers gain some basic knowledge before they enroll in your services. Such information will also help your existing users get more knowledge on SEO. Remember, the more you educate people with quality content, the more loyal they become to your business.
Relevant content
Your website should have the content related to your business or industry. Relevancy also means writing on the topics on which your customers are highly interested in and actively searching for. People come to your website for information related your business/industry. If you don’t have that or worse, if you have content that is not at all relevant to your business, it will be a major turnoff for your visitors. They may not come back to your website again. Search engines also are aware of this fact and rank only those pages that have relevant content for the given keywords.
Well-written content
Unlike the readers of traditional print media, web users scan the content, at the very first glance, instead of reading it. Obviously, scanning big blocks or chunks of content is very difficult compared to reading small pieces of content. Hence, the content of the website should be well structured and follow some basic principles to enhance its usability.
- Make the sentences brief and simple to make them easy to read and understand.
- Break the content into small paragraphs with meaningful headings. Content in each paragraph should be in sync with the heading. See to it that there is a sequential flow of information between the paragraphs.
- Make paragraphs small to ensure that the content piece does not look too big, when it goes live on the web page.
- Present content in bullet point format to make it easy to read and effectively use bold and italics to emphasize important points.
Spelling and grammar errors
Using correct grammar and spelling is important because 99% of communication on Internet is in written form. A single spelling mistake can destroy the entire credibility of the site among visitors. Even search engines are very strict on pages with spelling and grammar errors. They penalize pages with these errors.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism, copying and using content without proper citation, is against copyright laws. Further, search engines will penalize websites that use plagiarized content. Therefore, it is extremely important to ensure that the content in your website is unique and original. Also don’t try to take content from other sites, reword it and use it as unique content. Search engines can easily identify these kinds of practices. Use your ideas and expertise in your industry to create unique content.
Optimize the keywords
Having quality content in your website is necessary, but this alone does not guarantee increased traffic and sales. You need to optimize your website in such a way that your customers and search engines find it easily.
Keywords are the words and phrases that are more likely to be used by your target customers to find you on the Internet. You can get those keywords by doing proper keyword research. Keywords for your website should be relevant to your business/industry. See to it that you place prominent keywords in title tags, header tags and in the content.
At the same time, don’t try to over-use them. The keywords in the content should look natural. Search engines will penalize the webpages with unnecessary and more keywords. Also, while using keywords in the content, make sure that the sentences are grammatically correct and sound natural.
Now that you are aware of the key elements of exceptional business content, we hope you will create high quality content for your websites to attract potential customers and rank well in the search engines as well.
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