Home › Posts › Jan 15, 2009

Creating a functional, useable, linkable website: write a few articles

The reasons for writing articles about your topic of choice should be fairly obvious. First, it gives people a reason to come to your site in the first place. Second, it gives people a reason to share your site with others. Third, it gives the search engines something to find and some way to categorize your site. The decision whether or not to write about your industry or product was made when you set out to create a website; it’s a no-brainer. How you go about writing these articles and what you write about is a bit more complicated.

Each article should be directly and completely related to the reason why you have a website. The topics you pick should be related to something that the people you want to address would search (called keywords), something they would read, and something they would send to their colleagues. Additionally, it also needs to be directly related to what you’re selling; you want links in the article to point towards monetized outcomes.

When you write your articles, keep a few things in mind:

Uniqueness is almost as important as usefulness with respect to web content. There are plenty of articles out there on financial matters so breaking through the noise is important. Even if a good portion of the article is about raising stock price, phrase the article towards a certain niche or industry. You’ll show up for less search terms but you’ll rank higher for the ones that you do show up for. This translates directly to more eyeballs on your page (and more potential customers).
Make sure you insert some personality and speak to the lowest common denominator. Your topic might be high-level information but the more people that can understand it and relate it to their own situations, the more likely it is that people will share it with others. Include a bunch of jargon and huge words are you’re going to alienate people.
Invest in a recurring editor or an editing service. Typos, grammatical errors, and crappy punctuation could relegate a great article to the Un-clicked Archives of the Internet. Pick one person or one service and make sure they can retain your personal voice through their editing. Perfection is not required but poor sentence structure leads to a crappy read.