How to write good web content

 ...and make it SEO friendly too

What with all the fanfare made about generating links and adjusting title tags, it's often very easy to overlook other vital aspects of web marketing. Few of these are more important than good web content on ALL of your pages. This not only influences your search engine ranking as I will explain later, it also just makes your users experience better.

Let's deal with that first. Say you own a shopping mall. It is a marvelous feat of engineering with 15 levels, rocket-fuelled escalators and trapeze artists doing backflips off the water features. You would expect many, many visitors, correct? Now say you rewrote all of the signs and renamed all of the shops in an obscure language like Yiddish, would you expect to maintain the amount of visitors you had? Doubtful.

The same applies to web content, make it difficult for your users to understand what you're saying at your peril.

The key to good web content is to make it short and simple. 95% of web users skim, not read, which means that you've got less time to make your point. A rule of thumb is to write short, concise sentences with an idea per sentence. This is called making your content scannable

If you want to keep people reading your page, or you want to get them to perform a specific action, you're going to need some structure to your copy. Generally I write my content to this formula, called AIDA:

A: Attention
Write a strong headline and opening sentence. The purpose of this is to attract the attention of someone browsing.

I: Interest
The key to generating interest is to progressively reveal information. Throw in a few interesting facts about your product, the purpose of this is to keep them reading.

D: Desire
Now is the time to explain how your product can benefit them. You've already outlined what the product or service is capable of. Now is the time to show how it relates to them and generate some desire for your product.

A: Action
Now you push for the sale or enquiry, how you do this is up to you. It could be with a simple "click here", or maybe an encouragement to find out more, this ultimately depends on your style. Either way you're showing them how to get what they want.

Now how does writing good clear copy relate to web marketing? Aside from the fact that more people will come back to your site, as well as referring it more, you'll also influence your ranking in the search engines.

A fact of SEO is that Google, as well as the rest of the search engines; will spider your pages more if your content is updated regularly. Another fact is that search engines value clear, well written pages with lots of organic keywords higher than those that make little or no sense.

When including keywords organically into your copy, it's important to remember that the accepted maximum amount of keywords per page is 10%. Ideally, you want 3-6% of your content to be keywords. Any higher than 10% and you risk being banned by Google. This is to counter people stuffing keywords unnaturally into the copy and skewing the results. A great way of monitoring your keyword density is to check out www.seochat.com . They have a fantastic tool that gives you the frequency of keywords used in your webpage.

By including keywords naturally in your content, a lot more weight is placed on them by Google, giving you a higher ranking, as well as more visitors.