Simple Guide to Create Great Content

The challenging equation of online success is related to traffic and content. These main points are opening clues of success room. 

A successful website is one that attracts a lot of audience, but to maintain and keep that audience engaged and keeps coming needs good content. In fact this is the objective of most online businesses, if not all of them. And those that do not make that goal primary should reconsider their priorities.

After all the Google updates, writing great content is no longer a choice but a necessity for those seeking success. Crappy content won’t do you any favor and will just hurt your business and online reputation. But when you invest time and energy in creating high quality content, you’ll get rewarded by search engines and will do well in ranking.

Write Original Content

In addition to lexical and grammatical factors, great content needs to be original. Copying others’ content and publishing it on your site will get you a duplicate content penalty. Make sure that what you are publishing on your site is original and no other page in the web contains that same content.   

You can’t fool search engines in this, they are not dumb as they used to be before Panda update. Now, search engines are savvy to know original from garbage content. No matter what your content is for, your content should be done right.

Write Informative Content

When you create content with the primary purpose of improving user experience, you will certainly double efforts to write more than just average content. You will continue refining your content to include as much information as possible. And every sentence, every paragraph is giving the audience the reason to keep reading and learn new things.

While writing, try to predict questions your audience might answer and try to answer them. If you answered as much answers as possible, your users will find you helpful and they are likely to share your content in social media and tell others about help you are offering. 

When your content is relevant for certain answers, you’ll get the great reward – to rank well for that term in search engines.

That kind of content which is significant and informative will be the backbone of your marketing strategy to come, and will stands you from the crowd. When you have high quality content, everything to come in your marketing efforts will be easy to set.

Include Images

Including images in your content is of great importance. Human brains like visual items such as images and videos. Visual content supports and strengthens points you are discussing in your text. So, when picking images to include in your content, this should be done carefully. You need to pick attracting images first with great size, color and contrast. In other words, avoid using blurring, tiny or very large pictures.

Also make sure that your images are relevant to your content.  Your images should reflect what your content is about. It might not be relevant to write about a journey in snowy weather in Alaska with a picture of dunes from Texas desert. It doesn’t make sense!

If you are an e-commerce website, including images of products you are selling is extremely important. Providing product images helps customers have an idea of products before hitting buy button. In such websites, product image is much more important than product text description.

Make your content Easy to read

When we start to learn how to write, we try to use big words to impress others and gain recognition that we are capable of writing great text. Unless you are an academic researcher who has to keep in line with firm academic style, just get rid of this bad habit.

If you completely believe that the ultimate purpose of creating your content is to be helpful, then keep simple to the maximum. Stay away from big words that might confuse your readers. 

Don’t use acronyms to be short or to look savvy, but use them when it’s necessary. And when it’s necessary to use them, don’t forget to refer the complete meaning when you use that acronym for the first time.

Your audience may contain experts that easily understand all the technical words you are using. Yet, your readers also might be some newbies that come to your site to learn something. So, make sure that you are there to help them. Thus, keep your technical words to the minimum, and clarify those that need explanation.

Make your content easy to scan

We are in a world of Speed! Most web readers want to get knowledge as fast as possible. So, they scan your content instead of going through it word by word.

Another reason why users scan content is to get a first impression if the content contains relevant information and worth the reader’s time. The first impression is always of great value!

To effectively reflect a good impression of your content, make sure that you write great titles. A title is the first part your readers will notice. Titles grab readers’ attention in search engine results, rss, social media, and wherever your content is shared. 

So, to attract more people to read your content, try to make it easy to scan. To do that, you need to keep your paragraphs short and your sentences to the point. Try not to include a lot of ideas in one paragraph. 

Use titles and subtitles and do some formatting in your text such as Italics and Bold.

Try to use lists. Users love lists as they offer enough knowledge easily with less explanation. So, when you create lists, be clear and to the point. Remember, that lists grabs user’s attention and do well in your content marketing strategy.

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Rachid Madani

I'm here to help you reach success with your online business. I can help with content marketing, social media, SEO, and email marketing. I provide tips you can follow to build a succesful online business.