03 09 08 - 11:36
Some tips for writing for your website
By John PotterFirst and foremost keep this in mind. An article that gets tons of attention for a very short span of time does you less good than an article that gets continuous attention over the long run.
Search engines are probably the biggest resource of visitors that you get, so it’s best to accommodate them. Web pages take time to be propagated and spread throughout the web and the sites that link to you.
RSS has helped make this time lag short, but in my eyes the internet is still largely optimized for a slightly longer term approach.
Most search engines base ranking largely upon link popularity and the quality of those links. It takes time for search engines spiders and bots to crawl the whole web looking for these links and it may take time for other sites not using
RSS to stumble upon your content. This usually means that the longer your information stays relevant the better that page’s chances of good placement on the search engines and thus more qualified traffic.
So….what are my concrete suggestions?
First off, just like in journalism, try to answer “who, what, when, why, where, and/or how”. People are using the internet to try and solve problems. They gravitate towards articles that provide straightforward solutions. I would also bet these are the six most used search words.
Try to post articles that relate to one another in some way and link them, so that people want to spend more time on your site. This can also help you with search engine placement.
Write fresh content for every article. Don’t rephrase what you wrote last and consider it new content. Your readers won’t.
Try new things. The worst that can happen is the article takes up a little space on your server. In the best case you may stumble onto a new method of marketing yourself.
Although it is important to announce participation in events, sales and receipt of awards this information has a short life span of usefulness. No one cares what convention you were at last year. Articles that people are still reading next year are more beneficial to you and they contribute to the value of the web.
By posting information that people find useful you are helping them while driving traffic to your site, reinforcing your brand and if you’re clever giving a good reason to use your product or service. It may sound silly or naive to think that by trying to make the internet better you can help yourself individually, but there is no reason you can’t. You always hear “information is power” and “content is king”. Well take matters into your own hands. We all have more unique information at our disposal than we give ourselves credit for. Start posting some of it on the web and empower yourself. It’s a win-win situation.
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