Quality Content – Some Good Practices To Follow

This post was written by Internet Marketing John on January 22, 2010
Posted Under: Website Usability

Quality content influences your website and the search engines, more than any other type of search engine optimization strategy you can use, to generate traffic to your site.

Website users know quality content when they see it; and more often than not they will tell other users about a website that provides compelling, useful, quality content.

Social media sites, emails, blogs, forums, and word of mouth, are how users spread the word and help build your website’s reputation however, without quality content, it is highly unlikely anyone will bother returning to your site after their initial visit.

Here are some practices to follow for creating quality content:

Avoid writing sloppy text. With spell checkers freely available online, there is no reason to have misspellings and grammatical errors in your content.

Avoid embedding text in images for text content. The search engines can’t read text in images, and your users may like to copy and paste the text.

When you write, make your text easily readable. Users like to read easy to follow, well written content.

Avoid disorganized topics. Break up your content into organized sections, so that your users can quickly find the content they need. Always organize your content so readers can easily determine where one topic starts, and another topic ends.

Avoid writing volumes of text without having any layout separation, paragraphs, or subheadings. This does nothing but confuse readers.

Be sure to use relevant terms in your writing.

Consider what keyword, or keyword phrases someone would use to search for your content, and then incorporate them into your writing.

keyword discovery tool

You can also find the top search queries that your website appears in, as well as the the queries that direct most users to your website, with Google Webmaster Tools.

Using these keywords, or combination of these keywords in your content, enables your users and the search engines to easily find your pages.

To write quality content, avoid reusing any existing content on your site. This gives no extra value to your website and can even hurt your ranking.

Create unique fresh content to keep your existing clientele and to attract new visitors to your site.

Avoid duplicate content on your website at all costs. Remove anything that even resembles duplicate content from your site. Duplicate content gives your readers no additional value and the search engines will penalize you for using it.

Quality content is content that is primarily written for your users, not for the search engines. You can make your website easily accessible to the search engines, but it is important to create quality content for your users.

Avoid placing unnecessary keywords in your content, targeted for the search engines, that make reading difficult. They often make no sense, and are extremely annoying to human readers.