Website Marketing - Surefire Design

Creating content for your website can be a difficult thing to start, but gets easier with practice!

If you are writing on topics you know well, (i.e. Your business products and services), you should be able to create content that is both interesting for your customers and useful for Google in ranking your website pages. Its a balancing act to provide useful short punchy information, in a format easy to read online.

Sometimes starting can be the hardest part.
So how do we begin to create content from a blank page?

This is my simple approach!

A) Absolutely first of all, have in mind your key 3-4 search phrases that you want to use to optimise your overall site. If you have these in mind or written down, they will naturally appear in your content and this is what Google wants to see.

1 Plan the content you are going to make. I find it difficult to pull content from thin air. But if I plan what I’m going to say on 4-5 pages, I know what I need to generate.

3 Once you have asked these normal everyday questions, simply answer them! You could answer these naturally if someone were to phone you, so write that answer down. Turn the questions into sub headings - ‘Territory we cover’. Writing in your own personal manner can be really appropriate for content on websites for small and medium size businesses. This depends on a little on your industry. Mostly we don’t all have to write content trying to sound like some high flying marketing corporation.

At the end of the day, it’s about good, useful information for your clients.

Here are some additional tips to keep in mind while creating content.
* Write for the customer personally
* Keep paragraphs short, 3-4 lines
* Use Sub Headings
* Write short sentences
* Keep your keywords and search phrases in mind
* Add little bits of content regularly over time and Google will love you!

Think back to when we did training. The second most important thing you will have been told is - paste as plain text.

We all know online editors have some quirks. But the most significant is to do with pasting content.
The issues lay with what you can’t see. When you select and copy content from another source like a website or Microsoft Word, other hidden information comes with it.

In particular if you select and copy from MS Word, you also get lots and lots of hidden Microsoft tags and code. You can’t see it, but it will break your page and make your content look terrible, or impossible to format and edit.
Not to worry though! You can still copy content from elsewhere. The key is to use the following process.

1 Copy content from source
2 In your website admin put the cursor where you want the content.
3 DO NOT right click paste, or hit ctrl V! Instead press the paste as plain text button on the editor toolbar.
4 You may want to go and delete the lines between paragraphs, and replace them by hitting Enter. This makes them proper paragraphs so you can format headings.

It isn’t really complicated, but definitely is a discipline when you are used to using quick shortcuts for pasting.
NOTE you CAN copy and paste content within your own site. Either within the editor, or from your live site.

To see the process in detail watch the following Surefire Help Videos-

Part 1: Paste as plain text from another source

Part 2: Preparing pasted content for formatting

Part 3: Formatting text content