26. Creating Outstanding Content

Web content is what makes a website stand out on the web. If you don’t include those extra words, you are not likely to be found for it either”. You see, search engines cannot understand exactly what you mean without keywords visible in the text format.

Creating News Content

In the best world, try to update your website every day. This way, you can become the leading website within your industry. Make sure it’s interesting, well-written content, with keywords in the right places.

Continuously added content is an indicator of trust and that you’re up to date.

Updating and Extending Current Content

It’s also important that your common web content gets updated once in a while. Nothing major is required, just that you have the facts right and the information is relevant and up to date. If possible, you can add twitter or blog posts to your content in order to make it fresher.

Content reading level

It can be useful to check out your reading level in order to check if you go towards the right target group. For an audience with university background, a basic reading level might be to aiming too low. On the other hand, an advanced reading level might be too high if your website is targeted for kids and teenagers.

What is Quality Web Content?

There are a few things that characterise high quality web content, such as:

• Unique, not like everyone else.
• Specific – Describe your content by using exact and specific words, so both users and search engines clearly understand. Try to avoid being vague or using words with multiple meanings.
• Simple & Easy to understand for your average readers and target group.
• Grammatically correct: Make sure to use a spelling program, or it might backfire on your search engine rankings.
• Include keywords in the right places: Without well-crafted keywords in titles, headlines, images, backlinks, internal links, url names and content you are not likely to be found in the top. At least not for competitive keywords.
• Not too short: Quality content on the web is seldom below 500 words, but often more than 750 or 1000 words.

How Engaging Is Your Website Content?

It’s important to make a website about topics and news that your users like to read and engage with. Engaging content can be passed on to friends by downloading, signing up for newsletters, clicking ‘Like’ on Facebook or by the +1 feature in Google.

By checking how many Digg’s and Facebook likes you get, you get a certain understanding about how engaging the content is.

Tools to measure content engagement

• Alterian
• Google Analytics
• Social Mention