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Can your people write killer website content? (Even if so... do they really have the time?) It’s often said that content is king, and for good reason. Without content, all the keyphrases in the world are meaningless. Without content your visitors won’t find your site relevant. Without content, the search engines won’t be able to determine your site’s relevance. Without content, your prospects won’t find your website... Period. Search engines gobble up content; that’s what they are designed to do. Text content is one of the key factors that search engines use to determine the relevance of your web pages. Whenever possible, employ at least 200 to 250 words of text content for your most important web pages. This tactic can be a hard pill for marketers to swallow, but it does in fact improve search engine rankings. When you write your content, remember to write for your visitors and not the search engines. It’s important to note that visitors are scanning for relevant information first. Once your visitors find the content relevant, they’ll slow down and start reading. If your content already exists, you may need to rewrite the existing text to incorporate your selected keyphrases ...sensibly, considering density and proximity. The key to gaining search engine visibility is not stuffing your pages with the same keywords over and over in the meta-data or in your content. Nor is it hiding white text in the white background of your pages (which in fact the engines now recognize and treat as the web equivalent of spamming). Just be sure that your target keywords are incorporated into your content, while staying focused on writing for your visitors – not the engines. “OK, so ‘Content is King’ ...but it’s really hard. Can we get help?”It’s a complaint we hear all the time from our clients. Even when it’s not overtly expressed, there are often some tell-tale signs... - Content development is almost always the culprit when website-revamp projects fall off their timelines;
- In delivering SEO services, we frequently discover content that isn’t properly supporting the cause.
Why Is It So Hard, Anyway? In part, because writing for the Web just isn’t like the writing that most marketers are used to ...like newsletter articles or brochures. That’s because of the way your website visitors “read” ...which is really more like scanning and skimming, with true reading reserved for only those nuggets of great interest discovered in the skimming stage. (And that’s assuming they stay interested long enough to find any such nuggets!) Further, your copy needs to help the search engines find your site ...something that’s just not an issue with any of the off-line vehicles. But even if you have people who can generate content appropriate for the Web, do they really have the time? ...especially when a fairly large amount of content needs to be developed fairly quickly? If in desperation they start putting up last year’s brochures in lieu of properly-built content ...well, that’s a shortcut that’s only going to cause problems down the road. Further, while those people are tied up doing website content, they can’t be developing webinars, direct mailings, brochures or other things that produce leads or accelerate sales cycles today. Can You Get Help? ...Absolutely. And that’s exactly why eMagine offers a content development/upgrade service. Our professional writers can take your brochures, MRDs or other raw material and turn it into compelling website content that is... - Engaging – We’ll make sure your visitors are too captivated to leave before getting to the good parts.
- Concise – The verbose style of many brochures is certain to send most web visitors packing. We’ll give them “just the facts”... no hyperbole or back-patting.
- “Drill-down” organized – Web visitors get impatient with story-type narrative or tedious exposition. Our content lets them control their level of detail: when they find a topic of real interest, they’re happy to dive down and read more.
- Keyword-rich – We’ll ensure that your content incorporates the keywords and keyphrases that we know (vs. surmise) your market uses when looking for your type of product or service.
Or our Web-copy experts can take your existing site content and make it much more search-engine friendly, which should result in greater traffic and more bona-fide leads. It’s not only the easy way... it generally also leads to better results. We’ve helped numerous other clients with their content-development chores, and will be happy to provide a quote for your particular challenge.
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