Writing Content
January 30, 2006 – 11:39 pm
People think what I do or what I know is good however everything I do with web sites and everything I know with SEO (and I don't mean to sound like I know a great deal!) is useless if you do not have good content. Content is the key to a good site. Content will make or break your rankings in the Search Engines (providing everything else is optimised for them that is), and of course content is there for your visitors to read, further their interest in your web site and hopefully convince them to return at a later date.
But herein lies the problem. How do you write great content? You can sit and do your market research, research your key phrases for the spiders to pick up on, but how do you write around those phrases and make your content flow naturally? To me it's the hardest part of a web site. I can use Photoshop (if I have to!), I can write CSS and strict XHTML, I can do the dynamic pages in PHP. Good structure, research the phrases and do the market research. It's all possible to do this and to learn how to do it. But write good content? That's a gift, a talent that you either have or don't. Whilst I can read content and determine if it's good or not, correct spelling and grammar easily enough, I cannot create it, and it's very frustrating!
I have to work with a PR & Marketing Guy for my contract job. It's his job to supply the content for the works websites, yet what he supplies me is just repetitive with a couple of word changes here and there. He seems to think that pasting a long list of job titles (it's a recruitment agency) will do the job. It's highly annoying because he's meant to be the pro at copy writing and I'm just the developer, so my opinion cannot be right. I'm sure, despite my lack of ability to write content, that what he produces is far worse.
I've been looking into ideas for monetising the Tattoo site. I have a couple of possible sites/people to contact about dropshipping to however right now I think the site doesn't really have much to offer besides the average 200 visitors a day. It currently has one article, courtesey of Wikipedia.org, which doesn't help with the old duplicate content penalty in Google, a few product pages and some link pages. If I was looking to approve a site to sell my products I wouldn't approve the Tattoo site right now. Nothing is exactly original. Whilst I want to create a really good resource site and I realise sometimes it's just a case of bringing the information, links and products to one central place which is what we're beginning to do, I still don't think there's anything original on it. Trouble is my ability to write content coupled with the fact that I know nothing about Tattoos (no I'm not going to get one to find out about them!). But it's definitely something I need to sort out before approaching any companies. I've found one affiliate shop, but I'd rather be a reseller over an affiliate.
I've also been studying the stats for my osCommerce Templates site. It's getting visitors in from country specific Google searches but it's only really ranking of osCommerce eBooks, and only on the 4th page according to Digital Point. I didn't really think about it until today (bad on my part I know) but the site has very little content. Again it's a subject I don't know much about as I've only played a little bit with the application (I know, great reason for buying a site selling products for it!). I need to sit down, learn the software, read the eBooks I affiliate with, and start writing some decent content for it. Luckily it's a little bit more of a technical subject which I can write a bit better about I think.
Sorry I've not really answered the question of how to write good content, because I simply don't know. I guess I don't tend to have much of a problem rambling on this blog so perhaps that's the key. Know everything there is to know about your chosen subject and the content will flow.
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