Your website content can maximize the business of your site if used properly. Your content helps you get in search engines, speak to visitors, and ultimately get visitors to buy, contact you, or follow a link. Meanwhile, your content has to be updated at least once a month if you want to get return visitors and search engine traffic. To be successful, you need to have a web content strategy.
The 4 Basic Web Content Strategy Components
1. Licensed content that you can publish on your site for a one-time or recurring subscription fee or in exchange for putting a link to the authors’ site under the article can build up your site quickly, but might also be unoriginal and lack search engine optimization or become expensive.
2. Original content contributed freely by your visitors, such as message boards and guestbook-style comments. This is free, but might need more maintenance.
3. Original written content that you allow other sites to republish in exchange for a link to your site.
4. Original, well-written content that’s exclusive to your site.
What Kind of Content to Use
All four kinds, that way you’ll maximize the amount of quality content your site can have. But, the precise ration of the four kinds of content you end up using will depend on the goals of your site. Some examples:
* Licensed content: If you have a content-based website that draws revenue from advertising, a large amount of licensed content can be useful. However, if your site’s primary goal is to collect leads, too much licensed content might risk distracting visitors from contacting you, without the benefit of bringing in significant search engine traffic.
* User-contributed content: A website that handles support issues may have a lot of use for a user forum. A professional services firm would probably be better off without a forum, with all the user-contributed content in the form of testimonials.
* Original written content, exclusive and for distribution: Any website can benefit from original content since it draws search engine traffic. The broader your potential audience and the greater the competition from other sites, the more content you need.
Scheduling Content Updates
Search engines, especially Google, seem to give pride of place to sites that regularly update their content.
Regular content updates also give visitors a reason to return.
In short, if you have thirty web pages worth of content this month, it’s better to post one page each day rather than put them up all at once. To make sure you do this, schedule an hour each day for updating your site’s content. One way to get regular content updates for your site is to start a blog, a “web log” in which you write your thoughts and post news.
Identifying & Contacting a Content Provider
All successful website owners have someone else write a large part of their content. This person or company is called a “web content provider.” Your web content provider has to be a person or company with proven experience writing content for the web, rather than just print content.
