Top 5 Factors to Consider Before Buying a Website: Section 2

2)      Content Creation for SEO and Search Engine Marketing

A website company should be able to change the written content on your website free of charge as long as you provide the content. The text content on your website is your primary form of advertising because it conveys not only what you offer your customers, but the feel and dynamic you wish to convey about your brand.

But it is also important to know that the writing you have on your site impacts how you are found by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. This is known as search engine optimization or SEO.  There are many different factors that affect SEO such as backlinks, reviews, age of the site, URL, meta data and social media, to name a few. But the written content on your site is one of the most important and obvious aspects to focus on.

Think of the internet as the world’s largest market place and search engines as your guide. When you say, “I would like to see inexpensive shoes for women” the guide brings you to a list of sites that answer your request. But how does it know where to go? An over simplification of the answer is that search engine algorithms scan the text on a website to see if it is relevant to the query. So you want to make sure that the written content on the website has what the algorithm is looking for.

There are many different factors when writing quality SEO content. Here are a few of the most important ones:

• Keywords – these are the words that people type into search engines and correspond on your site.  Let us say that a person is searching for custom baseball bats. If you are a baseball bat maker then you will want to mention the word custom baseball bats several times in the content.  There is no hard and fast rule for keyword density (the number of times you place your keywords on a page or in a site); it absolutely must be done as part of a natural writing process. Don’t be overzealous with your keywords. If you just pile them into the text then this will hurt your ranking because search engines don’t like people trying to trick their algorithms by performing, what is known as, keyword stuffing. Thus, be mindful to have your keywords within the text but don’t make your content overly repetitive and unappealing to the reader.

• Niche marketing – As there are many websites out there that have placed a large part of their budget on their written content and search engine marketing, it can be hard for a newcomer to get a piece of the action.  But there are ways to get around this. One way is to do local SEO specific to the city you are in. This can work well because it eliminates most of your natural competition outside your area. The other method is to do niche marketing so that you are search engine optimized for a very specific term. For instance, instead of roofing you market for rubber tile roofing.  A good SEO marketing team should be able to help you find what marketing strategy would be most effective for your situation.

• Well written, engaging, original content - Quality SEO content isn’t just about getting people to your site, but keeping them there long enough to entice them to buy your service or product. This means you need to have well written content. If you just create or copy the same old content you see on other websites then what distinguishes you? But well written content also has a direct effect on your being found on the net. For instance, if your content is merely a bullet point list of your services, you may think it “looks simple and clean” but search engines will not like it because it does not fill content requirements. Copying content from another site, besides the obvious copyright infringement, will not give you great results.  For one, it is unlikely that a copied site will get a higher or equivalent ranking to the original site. Secondly, if potential customers see that your content is very similar to another site then they will most probably gain a negative impression of your business.

 The Bottom Line:  If you want your website to be successful then you need to have well written content and designate a part of your budget towards having an SEO strategy. If you do not then it is the equivalent of having a product but not advertising it, i.e., the chance of you being found on search engines will be very small.