What should I write on my website? - October 30th, 2008
While you may realise that writing regular content on your website is important for SEO, you may not realise that the style of that content, and indeed the ‘content’ of that content is equally important. Google likes to see regular updates on a website to know that the website is a source of information, and to know to come back regularly in order to index the website, but it’s not just a matter of throwing up any old content for the sake of Google.
If you start adding, for want of a better word, ‘drivel’ to your website you’ll be harming the effectiveness of your website, both in terms of your end users and your customers. Your content needs to be relevant to your website, and it also needs to be interesting and well written.
If you just add drivel to your website, yes it will keep your site ticking over with new pages, but it isn’t going to help you to attract links. Therefore you need to keep your content unique, informative and thought provoking. If you write interesting content, people will want to read it, people will want to share it and link to it and you’ll receive more traffic as a result.
For example, if you’re a furniture retailer and you write content that makes little or no sense, is filled with your keywords and contains a host of spelling and grammatical errors, nobody will want to read it. Nobody will link to it. You won’t get any traffic from it.
However, if you write about interesting furniture related news, such as the recent story about a woman who contracted a skin condition after buying a sofa imported from China, and died as a result, you’ll find people wanting to read it. It’s interesting, topical news. News that will be searched for by customers, and news that will garner your website links. It’s also controversial news, which always creates links online, and as links are very valuable for your website’s rankings and performance, by writing interesting content you’re enabling your website to receive free links, and thus free traffic.
Think about what you write on your website. If you put the effort into it you’ll find it more than pays off the investment in time that you’ve made. If you fill your website’s pages with dross, you’re just wasting your time.
Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer
