• The ability to structure your content so that it’s navigable and accessible for users
• Ensure that visitors have all the knowledge and assistance they could need at the click of a mouse (which in turn means less generic emails for you to respond to)
• Work out the best way in terms of SEO to approach the publishing of content
• Your content can complement a link building campaign
• Allows you to budget for the cost of your website’s content – ideal if you need a large amount

The greatest thing about a content strategy is that it’s never too late to devise one and implement it. If your website currently displays poor content, why not think about replacing it today? Content is possibly the biggest asset your website can have – it’s money well spent and a very good investment. If your search engine rankings are currently “OK”, they could improve considerably with a well executed content strategy.

What types of website content are there?

At Chosen Writing we offer lots of different types of content as you’ve probably noticed by now. The fact is that most website owners think it’s purely a case of publishing a few sentences and hoping for the best – the reality however is that search engine algorithms are becoming increasingly hungry for fresh, interesting content. That means if you want your website to sit pretty in the SERPS for any sustained period of time, adding content should be something you do on a regular basis. Of course the major downside to adding content is that it’s time consuming (but don’t worry – we can write it for you and save you a load of time).

Here are some ideas for uses of the work that we provide:

• Blog posts: The blog posts that we write are ideal for publishing on your blog (you’d never have guessed, right?). We can write anything from industry news blogs, to general informational blogs. Your wish is our command – just let us know what you need. Sometimes clients even elect to publish short blog posts on Facebook – have you tried that yet?
• Articles: In times gone by articles were great for building back links on article directories – those links are now frowned upon by most webmasters as they offer little (if any) SEO benefit. We’ve found a new use for general articles though – they make great knowledgebases. No site is complete without a knowledgebase. A knowledgebase is just a section that covers the products and/or services offered on your website, a section that offers genuine value to visitors.

Content strategy is really important – don’t overlook it. If you’d like a quick chat about your website’s content and how it can be improved, ensure you call us today – we’ll be glad to assist you!

How to check for duplicate content

There isn’t really a tool that you can use to check for duplicate content on your website since it appears for different reasons (if you’re looking to find duplicated content on the internet in general however, Copyscape is a fantastic tool to use). The best thing to do first is to copy a large chunk of text off your site’s homepage then search for it in Google. If it only comes up with one result and that result happens to be your website, it’s all good. If it comes up with multiple results on your domain for the same piece of content, you know you’ve got duplicate content problems.

Sometimes you will find that duplicate content shows up on domains that you don’t own – this is when you really need to take action. A lot of people out there will rip off your valuable content by simply copying and pasting it to their site. There are various steps that you can take under these circumstances including reporting the offending sites to their webhost. One thing you should be careful of is development sites. When someone designs a site for you they often do so on a test server before making the site live – sometimes that test site is left up by accident. If this is the case just drop the developer an email and ask them to take it down.

Rectifying duplicate content problems

The only way to rectify the problem of duplicate content is to remove other instances of the same content from the internet. If this isn’t possible then you should set the other instances of the content to noindex – this tells search engines that this page shouldn’t be indexed. The main problem with duplicate content is that it’s devalued – as well as that, search engines are faced with a huge dilemma of which page to rank first. It’s a pretty tough choice when all of the content reads the same.

Some content management systems out there introduce the problem of duplicate content because of the way in which they are structured and coded. WordPress for example is a big offender – you’ll find duplicate content plastered across author pages, tag pages, category pages and even archive pages. You could have the same blog post duplicated three or four times on your website which could be causing some serious harm in terms of search engine rankings.

Check your blog for duplicate content right away – it could cost you a lot of traffic and cause a lot of trouble if you don’t address this simple problem immediately. The simplest way to rectify problems caused by duplicate content is to re-publish your entire website using unique content written specifically for you.

Take a qualitative approach

Instead of aiming to churn out X number of articles during X period of time each day, you should instead just set aside a reasonable amount of time in which you can research and write a really interesting blog post. If you’re unable to complete the blog post in one session, leave it half-written and finish it the next day. If you find that your research takes you much deeper into the issue than you’d envisaged, take five sessions to complete it. The longer you spend on a piece of writing the better it’s likely to be. The more original and informative an article is, the better it’s going to attract links.

Five articles written in an hour each might attract no links and no readers – whereas one article that takes the best part of 20 hours to write might be a revelation bringing in thousands of links and torrents of traffic.

Although lots of blogs are good, those blogs should offer value and real information to readers – they shouldn’t just be published for the sake of it, because your SEO guy has told you the more content the better. Carefully planned, well executed blog posts are much preferable to “hammer content”.

When to blog

Some people blog first thing in the morning, others blog last thing at night. Some people manage to find a spare 10 minutes during their lunch break; others don’t have time at all. It’s entirely up to you when you choose to blog. If you have days packed full of work and little time to yourself it might be worth dedicating half an hour to blogging at weekends.

Got no time at all? Outsource!

If you have no time at all to dedicate to blogging on a daily basis, the best thing to do is to outsource. Outsourcing your writing work is really easy – here at Chosen Writing we offer a blog writing service to our clients. All you have to do is let us know the niche or topic that you’d like the blog posts to be written on, and we’ll get them done for you. Some clients like to be “hands on” – keeping tabs on us every step of the way. Other clients prefer a “hands off” approach where we complete the blog writing projects for them with minimal intervention – we can even upload blog posts directly into the CMS of your website if you ask us to. We offer a fantastic blog writing service, so why not try it out today?

Blogging is an important part of SEO nowadays so don’t overlook it. If you’ve not got the time to blog yourself, pay someone else to instead.

The key benefits of a blog

Here are the three key benefits of a blog:

• Fresh content can be posted regularly – search engines give precedence to sites that are constantly updated as opposed to those that have nothing added for months or years on end.
• A blog is an ideal place to post marketing messages, special offers and general information about your company – by creating a blog following you can make a lot of sales. Share blog posts on social media websites and you’ll soon start to see an influx of traffic! Blogs are a rich source of back links, if you post up high quality articles your site’s SEO in general should see real benefit when people start linking in.
• A blog is great for targeting long tail keywords. You’ll see your blog popping up in the search engine results for all kinds of permutations and combinations of keywords that you hadn’t even considered!

Alternatives to a blog

If you don’t like the sound of installing a blog on your website there are some alternatives. A lot of business owners tend to add documentation sections to their websites instead. These are full of advice, hints, tips and tutorials. It depends on the type of website that you run as to what should go in the documentation section – but here are a few ideas:

• For a site selling car spares the documentation could contain tutorials on how to select the right parts to fit your car – as well as how to fit them once purchased.
• A site selling cosmetics could give ladies a guide on how to apply make-up, or how to choose the right tone of make-up to match their skin.
• A credit repair company could have a documentation section made up of articles that look at the benefits of credit repair and what the process actually entails.

These are just a few ideas! The fact is that even the most static website can be updated in some way. If you’re not going to install a blog on your website make sure that you update the documentation section frequently with a new article at least once per week. Once you run out of documentation articles to publish you should explore other ways of adding fresh, helpful content to your website in a bid to keep search engines happy.

It’s not just a blog that can benefit a website – any kind of quality content update will have a positive effect. If you love the idea of adding fresh content on a regular basis but you never seem to have the time, why not pick up the phone and talk to us – or send us a quick email? We specialise in writing blogs, articles and general website content – so we’re sure to be able to help you.

Negative SEO is something that’s becoming more and more of a threat. If you spend months or even years getting your website to the very top of the search engine results for a tough keyword, the last thing that you want is for someone to ruin all of that hard work by waging a negative SEO campaign against you. The problem is though, it’s very hard indeed to protect a website against negative SEO attacks due to the number of automated tools out there that make it simple to blast millions of links at a URL in just a matter of hours.

In this article we’re going to look at those who are at the biggest risk of suffering from negative SEO and what they should do about it. There’s very little written on the internet about negative SEO – especially from search engines themselves. Although most search engines do claim to have a firm grip on negative SEO and systems in place that are there to limit the damage caused, how effective are they? The answer is that we really don’t know.

Who’s at risk of negative SEO?

Any website that ranks highly for a search term that’s competitive could be perceived to be at risk of negative SEO from an unscrupulous competitor. It has fast become the competition’s weapon of choice when it comes to taking rival websites out.

Those people who target highly competitive search terms are likely to be at risk of being targeted – as are those people who peddle affiliate products. Affiliate marketing is a dog eat dog world with some pretty shady individuals operating in it – some of them will stop at nothing to get their websites to the pinnacle of the search engine results, even if that means destroying all of your hard work.

Keep an eye out for attacks

The best way to keep an eye out for negative SEO attacks is to look out for link warning notices in Google’s Webmaster Tools, as well as keeping an eye on the links to your website that pop up in there. Another way to keep tabs on negative SEO campaigns is to use back link checking services – the problem with these though is that most low quality links fired at sites as part of a negative SEO campaign can take months to be crawled for them to show up.

If you do discover that someone has been firing low quality links at your website it’s important for you to disavow those links immediately. If you receive any link warnings from search engines then those should be appealed too so that they can be manually reviewed. Be very careful what links you build yourself because sometimes they can break the terms laid out by search engines, which means that your site cannot be reinstated in the search engine results.

Negative SEO is a growing problem but by remaining vigilant there’s a lot that you can do to combat it. Remember there’s a whole lot more to SEO than simply throwing loads of low quality back links at your website. The most solid investment you can make in terms of SEO nowadays is in high quality website content, and of course on-page SEO. The great thing about content on-page SEO is that you can outsource these tasks relatively easily, and inexpensively. We offer website content writing here at Chosen Writing – so why not check out the services that we offer today?