An old colleague of mine wrote a great blog post about website content and how it relates to search engine optimization. It’s all about a developing a content strategy whereas great content is added to your website on a regular basis, showing the search engines (and those who are reading your website and visiting your website on a regular basis) that you’re a thought leader, and that you have a website that is not just “sitting there” idle. That’s what the search engines want, and that’s what us “humans” want. Content is king. Really, it is.
So, if you are unlike me and don’t think you have the ability to just sit down and write blog post after blog post and article after article all day long, then you’re probably going to need some inspiration. Some reason for sitting down and writing, some reason for sitting down and writing a blog post (you do have a blog on your website, right?).
There are a few places where you could get articles for website content:
– hire a writer (good writers are paid well)
– sit down and write it yourself (not good if you’re not a writer)
– search for a keyword at Google, find good website content, and copy/paste it onto your website (not recommended)
– search the news and write about current events and relate them to your industry or topic (good idea, but then again there’s a time issue or maybe you’re not really a writer)
– find something like articles for website content and read up on your subject; get ideas for articles or blog posts that you could write.
Researching your topic thoroughly on the web and then reading articles that have already been written for websites is a good idea; if you don’t have a lot of money to spend right now on website content, you could consider reading through Donna Mahony’s huge list of articles at FindAnyInfo.com that’s she’s put together. Donna is doing us all a favor by making this content available to all of us on the “honor system” (if you use any of these articles for your own use or if they inspire you to write more content for your own website), then feel free to ‘give back’ to her.
I don’t recommend that you use the “copy paste” method and literally copy these articles and let them get indexed by the search engines. You would need to rewrite them somehow or use snippets of them in order to please the search engines (Google especially doesn’t like duplicate content). So, take a look at this massive collection of ideas for website content and let me know what you think.