May 12, 2021 • Knowledge, Business
September 2, 2021 • Knowledge, Business
12 Tips On Creating Content For Your New Website (A Complete Guide)
Table of Contents
For beginners, tips on creating content for the new website can be a big challenge besides technical things. From defining a niche, choosing a website platform, and finding the right domain name.
Content is an effective weapon for a website to achieve success. Creating website content takes the longest time because a lot of needs (and doesn’t need) to be written.
Writing valuable website content will attract readers to visit your website regularly. Besides that, high-quality content will improve SEO rankings, bring in traffics and get leads.
So, how to create engaging content for your new website?
Today, we will give you a complete guide on 12 ways to create engaging website content, starting from what to prepare, making high-quality content, and optimizing content.
Let’s just get started.
What to Prepare Before Creating Website Content?
Before writing high-quality website content, there are three things you should pay attention to. What are they?
1) Define the Purpose of the Website
When creating website content, you need to know the reason why you are writing it. Knowing the purpose of your website from the start can help you craft quality content.
To make it easier, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is my website aimed at selling a product or service?
- Do I want to focus on increasing traffic to earn advertising/sponsorship revenue?
- Is my website aimed at getting new customers or getting leads?
- Do I intend to attract subscribers or build a community?
Once you get the answer, the process of writing content to achieve website goals will become easier. At least you know who you are creating website content for.
2) Recognize Your Audience
After determining your goals, you need to know who your audiences are to create suitable content. The more you understand your prospects, the easier it will be to attract more potential audiences.
The trick is to understand the mindset of the audience. Use audience’s point of view and answer the following questions:
- Who visits your website?
- How do they find your website in search engines?
- What problems do they face, and how can they be solved?
You can use tools like Google Analytics to research your audience. From basic information, how long they spend on your website, to what kind of content they are interested in.
If you can understand the characteristics of website visitors, you can build a great relationship with them. And if you can be an answer to their problems, they may become your loyal customers.
3) Research Competitors’ Website Content
You need to do a little research on content written by other websites. This is useful for giving you an idea of what you should do next. Why?
- Your visitors are likely to visit the competitor’s website, too. Find out what they read there, and create better content on your website.
- Helps you identify rising industry trends among competitors. That way, you can develop a strategy to be the leader of the competition.
- Inspires you to write new website content. Competitor websites can be a great source of ideas on what topics to write about.
High-quality content is content that is thoroughly created. And research on competitors is the best way to win the competition in the writing website content.
What are the Steps to Create Engaging Website Content?
Writing website content requires hard work, writing skills, and understanding the audience’s point of view. Here are the steps to create appealing website content to increase visitor interaction:
4) Produce High-Quality Content
In creating content for websites, write something great. High-quality website content has at least five of the following six criteria, namely:
- Offer something new;
- Changing perspective;
- Increase knowledge;
- Provide benefits;
- Inspire readers;
- Something entertaining.
For that, make sure you master the topic of the content you are going to write. You must present content that is not only enjoyable but also provides accurate information.
Writing accurate content is very important for the growth of the website. Never create content that containing hoaxes because the consequences can be fatal for your website.
Doing research related to the topic to be written is very necessary in this case. This can be done by reviewing information from trusted references such as journal publications or interviewing competent parties in their fields.
Suppose the content you present is high-quality, engaging, and accurate. Readers will be happy to read the website content that you wrote. And most likely, readers will return to visit your website at another time.
5) Avoid Plagiarism
One way to increase a website’s ranking in search results is to write original content. You can take inspiration from other websites but never plagiarize their content.
Be unique. Google really appreciates content that is created without any portion of plagiarism. If your content contains authenticity, your website’s performance will inevitably increase in search engines.
This will be directly equivalent to the traffic you will get. On the other hand, Google can quickly identify plagiarized content, and the consequences will be bad for SEO.
Your website will be in a lower position in search results. This definitely reduces your chances of getting traffic from user visits to your website.
There are three ways to avoid plagiarism in writing website content, namely:
- Include cited references. When creating content, you must specify where the information was obtained. Sources of data can be from journal publications or references from other credible websites.
You can create outbound links to other websites quoted. It’s essential to include references to increase the accuracy of the content presented.
- Do paraphrase. Sometimes even though you have written a reference, Google still detects your content as plagiarism. The fix is by using paraphrase.
Paraphrasing is using your own sentence structure to the quoted source while still including references. In the end, writing skills are needed to do this.
- Use plagiarism checker tools. Lastly, there is nothing wrong with using antiplagiarism software before publishing website content.
With this tool, your writing will be compared with content from other websites that have been published first. The antiplagiarism software then shows the percentage level of similarity found.
Some plagiarism checker tools that you can try include Copyscape or Duplichecker.
6) Write Briefly, Concisely, and Clearly
Content that is too long, convoluted, and the use of complex language can make your website lose visitors. Write website content concisely, and discard the unnecessary information.
Research from The Literary Project shows that the average American reads the equivalent of a 7th or 8th grader. Therefore, you need to:
- Use short sentences. Short sentences help readers digest information more easily.
- Focus on using nouns and verbs. Limit the use of adjectives and adverbs to keep sentences short and precise.
- Avoid using complicated terms. Not all readers come from higher education circles. Therefore, replace complex terms with simple words that have a broader meaning.
- Add examples. Providing analogies can help readers visualize your information more clearly.
By using simple language when creating website content, readers will find it easier to understand and remember more of the information you convey.
7) Make It Easy For Readers To Navigate
There are many ways visitors can find your website. It can be from posts you share on social media, outbound links from other websites, email subscriptions, or the right keywords on search engines.
Not all of them are familiar with the content of your website. Therefore, pay attention to the layout of the content you write. Most people read by skimming, so make sure your writing is easy to scan.
Take advantage of headings, bullets, and numbering to highlight points that are considered necessary in the website content. In addition, play with variations in the style and size of the text used.
That way, readers will more easily understand the message you convey. They may only visit briefly but have the potential to return to your website and become new customers.
8) Stay Away from Writing Errors
This point shouldn’t need further explanation, but any form of content on any platform should be free of spelling, grammatical, or punctuation errors.
The slightest mistake in writing content can make your website look less professional. And this disregard risks reducing the reader’s interest in what you present.
Writing errors in creating website content can be avoided in the following ways:
- Do not rush. Too hasty in creating content means the more likely you are to make mistakes. Always take the time to reread your writing.
Divide the writing process like this: 20% of the time, thinking about what to write, 30% actually writing, and 50% editing.
Breaking down the writing process can help you find errors and solve problems by providing fantastic website content.
- Don’t rely on tools. There is a lot of software out there that is useful for finding spelling or grammatical errors in writing. However, do not rely too much on such tools.
Use the spell/grammar checker software as needed only as an option in the editing process. Because often, they have limitations in detecting the context of writing.
For example, telling you that some words are misspelled when they really aren’t. Always use common sense in writing content and reread it until the results are absolutely perfect.
- Read from the bottom up. This is another way worth trying in detecting writing errors. Read the content you wrote sentence by sentence, starting from the very end.
This kind of proofreading technique allows you to focus on each sentence. It helps you find missing words, convoluted sentences, or other grammatical errors.
For those who are not used to it, of course, it feels a bit strange. But believe me, this method really works.
- Ask others for help. The traditional way of spotting writing errors is with help from someone else. Ask coworkers or boss to correct the content you wrote.
With the help of others, your writing is free of spelling errors and better in terms of flow and style of language used.
Anyone can produce website content without errors. You just need to write slowly and use the tips above.
9) Add Attractive Images/Videos
Research from NeoMam Studios shows that humans only remember 20% of what they read. But from the same study, it is proven that humans can digest 80% of the information they see.
Other studies obtained the fact that most of the human brain is visual. And the brain processes visual information many times faster than text.
Therefore, add infographics, images, diagrams, or videos to your content. This will help readers process the information better and grab their attention.
Visually rich content is also proven to increase audience interaction when visiting your website. We recommend adding at least one image to every website content you create.
But keep in mind, the image or video you include must be related to the topic being discussed. In addition, if you take someone else’s work, you must give credit to where the image or video was taken from.
It would be better if you make your own visuals. However, if you are not a graphic designer, many tools help you design graphics. For example, Canva or Piktochart.
10) Proofread Before Publish
Before deciding to actually publish content, make sure you proofread it first. This is an extra step that is often overlooked because it sounds trivial.
Sometimes, you believe that the content you create is perfect. But try to set aside time to reread what you have written. There may be spelling errors or even ineffective sentence structure.
In proofreading content, wait a few hours or even a day to correct what you have written. Allowing time between writing and correcting will help you find more mistakes.
If you write and then correct immediately, you will most likely rush into it. And this is, of course, not effective because you will definitely miss a lot of errors.
How to Optimize Website Content?
The journey of creating website content doesn’t stop after you publishing it. You still have work to optimize the content you have written.
11) Search Engine Optimization
Even though the goal of your content is to be read by humans, you also have to make sure it is search engine friendly. That way, it will be more accessible for your website to be in the top rankings, and many people visit.
There are several ways to optimize the website content to make it more SEO-friendly, including:
- Use the right keywords. The right keywords are words that have a large search volume, little competition, and are following the content of your website.
Keywords with an extensive search volume indicate that the topic is highly sought after by an audience. While keywords with little competition make it easier for you to rank higher in search results.
Choose keywords that suit your website to help your content stay relevant. You can’t just use keywords that are widely searched for even though they do not fit your website’s content.
You can do keywords research using several tools such as Ubersuggest, KWFinder, or Google Trends to get the right keywords.
Then, insert these keywords, especially in headings, subheadings, and meta-descriptions.
- Spread keywords appropriately. You must not overwhelm the content with keywords. This is one of the mistakes that beginners often make.
Overflowing keywords (keyword stuffing) is a way that is far from the standard SEO-friendly content writing. Google considers this as spam and lowers the quality of your content.
The risk is that your website’s ranking may drop or even be removed from search results. Hence, spread the keywords appropriately and sufficiently.
The number of keywords that you appear should range from 1-2% of the total number of words. Always remember, website content is meant to be read by humans.
- Insert internal and external links. Internal links (inbound links) are links that point to other content on your website. Inbound links are essential to make it easier for readers to move from one page to another.
Inbound links also help search engines to understand the context and relationships between pages on a website. Through inbound links, you can show the relationship between the content on your website.
While external links (outbound links) are links to other websites as a reference. For example, links to research results, statistics, citations, or references from other sources.
Outbound links help to show that the content you write has a credible source. In addition, your content is also considered to have the same topic as the reference website for search engines.
- Use simple URLs. Using a simple URL in the website content will make it easier for search engines to recognize the topic you are writing about.
Ideally, the URL for each website page should contain keywords that are relevant to the content. In addition, simple URLs also help readers understand what is on the web page.
- Optimization of visual content. Adding visuals when writing content is very important. But what you also need to remember is to optimize the visual content.
The goal is to save storage resources, load websites faster, and visitors stay comfortable when accessing your website.
There are several ways to optimize visual content on a website. First, provide a short, precise, and keyword-friendly file name.
Second, describe the alt text of each image/video in whole to help Google index the topic you are discussing. If necessary, also enter relevant keywords.
Lastly, make sure the visual size is not too big. An image that is too large will slow down website loading. Therefore, you need to reduce the size of the visual content before inserting it into the website.
12) Update Content Periodically
One way to make an excellent first impression is to make sure the website and everything in it are kept up to date. It is crucial to keep your website up to date and providing the latest information for readers.
So, what needs to be done to update website content?
- Refresh content from time to time. Add new information relevant to the content. For example, statistics, research, or the latest trends.
- Make sure your content performs well. Content that readers are less interested in may require multiple revisions. Try adding more examples, exciting visuals, or tips and tricks.
- Convert content to another format. You can reuse content that you have written. For example, designing infographics or creating videos based on existing content.
Summary
Maximizing website content creation is significant to achieving success in the modern and digital world today. For that, make sure you create the best possible content.
By applying the 12 tips on creating content for your new website above, you will produce excellent content as a surefire marketing strategy to achieve the expected business goals.
Start from preparing before writing content, the steps needed to create engaging website content to attract many visitors, and how to optimize content performance in search engines.
Everything can be done to help you grow your business. In the end, creating engaging website content is not an easy job, but you can learn it.
So, are you ready to create content for your new website?
Keep Reading
some other blog posts you might be interested in