Tips on Content Creation
Cheaters never prosper. Never copy content from other websites or use generic content
Duplicate content is anathema to search engines. It’s tough enough keeping the content on your site unique without stealing content from other people.
Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but it’s not going to get you to the top of a search results page.
Rank best by being best. Look at top ranking content for your keyword and write something more useful
Just because somebody already wrote about a topic and has position #1 on Google, doesn’t mean you can’t write about it as well.
Take a good look at the pages that rank top for your keywords, read what they have to say, and then write something more useful and more compelling.
Video works. Create videos to improve engagement, sharing and pull in traffic from video sharing sites
We’ve talked a lot about the sort of content you need to write, but video is actually one of the most compelling types of content you can include in your website.
It’s OK for your video to be a little “lo-fi” if that fits your tone of voice - take a look at the quality of the average YouTube video… Citizen Kane they are not.
Do remember to add subtitles to your videos; a huge amount of video is consumed by users who have their sound off. YouTube will add subtitles to your video automatically, but remember to edit them - the speech recognition is far from perfect.
“85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound. Facebook might be hosting upwards of 8 billion views per day on its platform, but a wide majority of that viewership is happening in silence. As much as 85 percent of video views happen with the sound off, according to multiple publishers.”
People still love infographics and are more likely to share these than text
Whilst we’re on the topic of visual content, people still love infographics. In fact, any content accompanied by a picture is far more likely to generate engagement and be shared, particularly on social media.
Write for humans, not for bots
So far, we’ve talked a lot about what search engines want.
In fact, we’ve talked about it too much.
Did you ever wonder what would happen if you forgot about search engines altogether and just built the very best website you could? The simplest navigation, the quickest load time, the best content…
Well, if the search engines are to believed - that’s the site that will be at number one in the search engine ranking.
Remember… SEO is changing. Search engines are getting cleverer, faster, and better at presenting the right result. So, there’s a simple answer to every SEO question - be the best result.
If your digital strategy is to constantly ask “What does Google want?” then you will always be one step behind. Instead, try to answer the question that Google are trying to answer - what does my customer want?
The SEO curse of over-optimisation that new SEO people fall for when they are doing SEO to improve their SEO on their SEO website
When people first start working on their SEO, they come across the concept of keywords. Then, they start to understand relevance and realise that they haven’t been using their keywords and phrases on their website.
And then, sometimes, people go bananas.
That person who didn’t use their keywords enough:
“This is our best product. When people ask us to make a recommendation, this product is always the one we recommend.”
Transforms overnight into someone who uses their keywords so much it feels like they are spraying their content at you from some sort of colossal machine gun loaded with an endless supply of their magic word:
“This 106 key UK layout keyboard is our best 106 key UK layout keyboard. When people ask us to recommend a 106 key UK layout keyboard, this is the 106 key UK layout keyboard that we recommend.”
Remember that you are not writing content to be read by a machine, you’re writing it for a human being.
If in doubt - read it out. Content that sounds strange to you when you read it aloud will not rank well.
