It is often said that when it comes to websites, ‘content is king’; search engine optimisation, structure and copy are all vital elements of an effective website. Relevant, optimised content will help your website to rank high in the search engines, making your site more visible to your target audience.
Here at Solutions Four, we know how important good content is for the success of your website – so we’ve put together these tips to help you create great website content that really works.
Create Effective Website Copy and Utilise Search Engine Optimisation
Layout – Your website should have different pages for each of your specific services or aspects of your industry. When you’re choosing the layout for your website design, you should also be thinking about what content needs to be on which page. Having the right layout helps to keep the page content relevant, which helps with search engine optimisation (SEO).
Volume – Visitors to your website don’t want to have to plough through thousands of words – they don’t want a story, they want direct and accessible information. Keep your content succinct, but do try to aim for at least 400 words to keep in favour with the search engines. Use paragraphs to help break the text down into bite-size chunks.
Headline tags and subheadings – Use headline tags for SEO purposes and break your copy down into subheadings. Internet users tend to skim-read web pages for relevant words and the search engines will take more notice of your keywords if they’re in headlines – so this strategy has double benefits. Using bullet point lists will also help with both skim-readers and SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation – Do your keyword research properly, or ask a professional to help you. You need to know what search terms are going to help drive the right traffic to your website and then use these keywords in your web content. You need a good keyword density (around 4%) and placement to help your search engine rankings climb. You should also optimise images for SEO and accessibility.
Bold copy – Yes, your copy can be bold in style if you wish, but we’re talking about using bolded text to make keywords and selling points stand out to both the reader and the search engines.
Unique and relevant – Don’t be tempted to plagiarise; search engines penalise sites with duplicate content, so make sure your website copy is unique and relevant to your industry.
Reading age and fog indexing – Copywriters use all kinds of magic to develop the best website content possible. Writing for the right reading age can help to ensure that you don’t confuse and lose your readers. Fog indexing does much the same thing, making sure the copy isn’t too complicated.
Keeping your content fresh – Search engines love to see your website content being regularly updated and will reward you for doing so. You can use a blog, news section or perhaps case studies to keep posting relevant content. It’s also a good idea to have a testimonials page – your visitors will appreciate hearing what other clients have to say about you.
Other content – Make sure you have a ‘Home’ page and an ‘About’ page is also a good idea to tell visitors about your background, accreditations and experience. You might want to have a ‘Links’ page to help with SEO and a map on your ‘Contact’ page to show your location.
Internal links – providing links to other areas of your site will help with search engine optimisation and make it easier for users to navigate around your site.
If you need a helping hand to create effective and persuasive content for your website that will help to boost your search engine rankings, speak to Solutions Four to find out about our copywriting services.
