How To Write GREAT Content

Before you even think of writing for the web, READ all of this post.  All of it.  Don’t start and leave early, finish.  Trust me, it’s just a few minutes of your time and it’ll be worth it.

So you’re writing for the web – which is a bit more complicated than writing for just humans.  If you’re a content copywriter or web developer or SEO professional, here are a few tips that I’ve posted in some forums for which I have gotten some praise and attention.  I’m assuming anyone that reads this knows that search bots ONLY read text on a page.  They don’t give a dern about pictures or styling or your pet’s name, just words, just content.  Text, end of story.  Content, that’s all. Hope this helps:

1. Know what in the world you’re writing about. If you don’t, then do a little research, become a pseudo-expert, and don’t get too specific with your details because you’ll be boring.  If you’re writing about diesel motors and you can’t find the gas cap in your own car, then you need some educating – obviously.  Find some sites, some resources, and take a day or three and spend some time learning about what it is you’re going to write about before your fingers hit the keyboard.  Nobody likes a loud mouth at a party, and you can come across the same annoying way online if you’re too novice to the topic at hand.

2. After researching, use the right words. This goes along closely with #1, but it’s a bit more specific.  You need to speak like the people that are going to read what you’re writing.  Better yet, you need to speak like the people you hope are going to be reading what you’re writing.  If you’re publishing a site about the mathematics involved in civil engineering, you had better know the difference between an acute and obtuse angle.  Further, using the right words will appeal to your intended audience but also using the right words will help with your search results positioning.  Now, I don’t intend to place a site on a SERP (search engine results page), I just try to grow the intended user count and let the rankings happen naturally along with inbound links (more on that in another post).  You need to examine competitors’ sites, look at their code, look at their inbound links, and align yourself with the market leaders – just do it better than them.  Then you can get to writing content, text, copy, whatever you want to call it.

3. Don’t overdo it. Spam – not the unwanted email kind – not the packaged meat product – no matter the make up, is gross.  I say gross because seeing a 179 character H1 in font size 6 at the top of a web page is, in a word, gross.  I like seeing that the same way I like seeing roadkill – no thanks.  There is too much of a good thing and search engines know it.  They’re smart programs built by teams of thousands of smart engineers that incorporate near artificial intelligence and you can very easily work yourself right out of being competitive when you go to far.  There really is too much of a good thing.  You should write your pages – the <title>, the <H1-6> headings, the <b> bold text, the <p> paragraph, all for the intent of a human to read them – because that’s who will pay the bills – but also with the intent for a search engine to like them – because that’s part of the goal.  I’ve seen countless “Help!  My site has tanked and I don’t know why!!!” cries for help in forums and the majority of the time the author has way, way overdone it.  Does “red roses, Red roses, red Roses, buy red roses, buy red roses online” make you want to buy red roses?  No.  It makes me think “this site sucks, I’m clicking <back>, and I’m going to buy flowers for the lovely wife somewhere else.”  Or the author has way, way underdone it.  Does a page <title> reading “Buy Flowers Here” appeal more than “Flowers For Sale | Free Delivery | Great Floral Deals | Weekly Specials” ?  Notice more than the obvious differences in character count, the <title> for one tells me more about what the page is about and it does it in a way that will appeal to a human while appealing to a search engine (notice the keyphrase usage, not to heavy, not too light).

4. Proof.  Read.  Proofread. Yes, go back and re-read everything you’ve typed.  A fantastic trick I learned in college – ROLL TIDE!!! – from Dr. Neal Voss is start the proofing process at the end of a document and read the last sentence first.  Does the last sentence make sense on it’s own after reading it?  If so, go to the 2nd to last sentence.  Does it make sense too, on it’s own?  Repeat as necessary until you’ve reached the top/beginning of your document.  Why?  I’ll tell you because Dr. Voss told me – you need to break down your own writing so it’s out of order so you can examine each sentence individually.  This way, you – the author – don’t get caught up in your own verbiage, your own stream of your own consciousness, your own thought processes, and you can find errors about 1,000 times faster.  This literally breaks you out of your own line of thinking and allows you to perform a 3rd party examination of your work – which is what editors are supposed to do for newspapers and since most of us don’t have one handy in our back pocket, this is a way to skip the employment of someone else.  Sure, some errors will always make it through – you’re human after all , but just try not to make any huge

5. Structure Your Content. That’s right, take some time after authoring and put an effective <tittle> together, develop the H1-H6 headings appropriately, and then put your content in.  Simply transferring something you wrote from MS Word to the web will get you exactly nowhere.  SEO copywriting is a thinking man’s game, like chess.  Not only do you have to make a move, you’ve got to think about where and why.  Much the same with SEO copywriting, you can’t simply lay out the words for someone to read and consider yourself “done” – heck, even a monkey can pound a keyboard and press the save button.  But deciding what terms and phrases to use, for which aspects of a webpage, is where you can seperate your site from the competition especially when joined with great content that a search engine and a human will both enjoy.  Remember, humans use a site and machines crawl it, so don’t forget one to focus on the other!

Ok, there you have it, my basic steps and advice to writing really good content for the web and humans.

UPDATE: Any fool can write an article, that’s why article directory sites have gone the way of the do-do bird.  Writing an article or the content for a website that effectively reaches humans and search engines is the delicate balance of creativity meeting technology.