By Judy Karimi Mboroki
Good content for your website will earn you more shares, earn back links for your page and earn the trust of your visitors. We are in an age where capturing a reader's attention is challenging. People are spending fewer seconds on pages than they did before.
To beat this, one must give visitors good content that can be optimized for the web and hold a reader's attention. These tips will help you give your content the attention it deserves.
Know your audience
Before you get down to writing, who are you targeting with your content? What audience are you trying to reach? The primary audience is your clients while your secondary audience is anyone else who may need your services later. Make your content accessible and interesting. Answer all questions your audience may have questions to?
Stay away from keyword stuffing
Keywords are very important when writing for the web, however, using too many of said keywords is frowned upon. The keywords make it easy for your readers to read your content. It also, makes your content valuable and search friendly. Overdoing the keywords just makes your work look untrustworthy to your readers and to Google too. It starts to look like low-quality content and you get a high bounce rate. Over time, this may cause you problems with the search engines.
Elicit emotion from your readers
Your content should make your readers feel something. Your headline should compel your readers to click, your introduction should hook your readers and make them stay, while your content should make the reader feel something.
Make your content reader-friendly
The attention span of online readers is a bit short these days so keep it short. Keep your paragraphs short, your sentences short, and avoid repetitions. When writing, make sure your sentence structures, tone, style and word choice drive readers into action. Avoid using passive voice.
Link your articles
When doing content writing, you find that there are topics you refer to often. Instead of repeating these points every time or writing new blog posts on the same, link back to them. Doing this will save you time, help search engines know that your site has related content, boost your search results, make your content useful and help it stay fresh. Search engines use these links to understand how pages across your website are related.
Keyword research
Now that you know your audience, use keyword research tools like AdWords Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword explorer. This will help you discover what your target audience is searching for on Google. This also helps you discover how competitive a keyword is. Incorporate these keywords into your content when writing.
Look for secondary keywords to blend into your content. They will help you rank for a wide array of long tail keywords which leads to more traffic to your site.
Keep your content simple
Too much jargon will send your audience away. Use language that is simple and easy to understand.
Write for your audience, not search engines
Make sure your content has keywords, but do not force them into your sentences in a way that doesn't make sense or sounds weird. Also, make sure keywords you target are relevant to your audience. Whether a keyword has high search volumes or not, ask yourself, is it relevant to my target audience?
Hyperlink your sources
If you use another website's content, make sure you hyperlink it. Cite your sources because it's the right thing to do. This may also get you a reciprocal link or a quote in the future.
Citing sources also shows that the information you are giving is credible.
Edit your content
Make sure your work is refined before publishing. Use tools like Grammarly to check for grammar and sentence structure. Double check for spelling mistakes and only use words that you are sure of their meaning.
Use social media to measure success
You are writing content so that it delivers you results. So, how do you then measure the impact of content you write?
Use Google analytics. This will help you track your website traffic
Use social media promotion. Identify what content gets likes comments and shares and what doesn't. Use this information to adjust the type of content you are providing.
Make your content easy to skim
Most web readers these days scan a page for the relevant information they need. This means you should put your most important information at the top and make sure your text can easily be skimmed through. You can do this by:
Using lists instead of one large chunk of text
Use sub headers to divide your work into sections. The headers will guide the reader as they navigate your page.
Use images and video
Incorporate this into your content since as studies have shown, the brain processes visuals 60,000X faster than text. Charts, graphs and infographics are also better at explaining information.
How do you make your content speak to your readers? Share with us
About the Author:
Judy Mboroki is a content creating guru at http://www.ardentwriters.com. She is also a freelance writer with experience in website content writing, article writing and blog writing.
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