As the internet is getting populated by a younger and younger crowd, and children are exposed to the lazy writing found in forums and chat rooms today, an interesting phenomenon is occurring - People as a whole are forgetting how to write, or not caring how to write decently.

When people write poorly, it becomes prevalent throughout the culture, to the point where poor writing no longer means the individual isn’t intelligent. Poor writing now points to the writing being very informal.

A new website intended to be the face of your business should really not be an informal affair. A site written in 1337 sp34|< (leet speak) will give people the wrong impression about you and your business. They will assume that you are a spam site and that you are intending to upload a virus onto their computer, or at least some malware.

Now, to be fair, not many people can write beautiful prose effortlessly when writing about their products and services on the internet. This is where independent proofreaders can come in handy. If you know someone who knows how to write, it’s more than worth it to ask them to look over your work and offer suggestions. If this is your personal website where you maybe sell some home made crafts, then just having a friend look over your text will be living up to your users’ expectations. However, if this is a larger business, and you’re selling something that’s been manufactured, you will want your text to be as professional as you are.

If you do not have a copy writer on your staff already, you will want to hire someone to do this for you. You need your text to not have blatant spelling errors and grammatical errors. It is also good to make sure that when someone is reading your information, that it is easy to read and understand what’s going on. The reason you don’t want to do this yourself is because you already know what you’re talking about and what you mean. Getting someone from outside the company to look at it can help make your information more friendly to people who aren’t already familiar with your product.

Really big companies will also hire professional copywriters. Provided enough information, these people can write about your company and your product and it will sound very good.

In an ever shrinking world where the words “ur a noob” and “lol” prevail, there is still a time and a place for professional prose.

Never Stop Improving!

If you are anything like me, you are addicted to the deep well of information that is the internet. You have probably included a few phrases into your regular vocabulary such as, “I’ll Google that later,” or “Well, the Internet says…” Why do people look online for their information today rather than using the routes to information that we used to use? In times past, if you wanted to know, say, the difference between an Arctic fox and a red fox, you’d go to the library and look in the encyclopedia. If the encyclopedia wasn’t as full of information as you’d like, you’d go to the card catalogue or (more recently) use a computerized search for books that had to do with foxes and then use the Dewey Decimal System to locate those books within the library. Then take those books, check them out, and read them, hoping that somewhere in the books was the information you were looking for all along.

Do you see any problems with the old system? Well, you probably got the information you were looking for, but who knows how old that information is? Maybe scientists had made discoveries with the DNA of both types of foxes to realize that they are, in fact, related, and not separate species? Or maybe the arctic fox is more related to wolves. Maybe one or the other is no longer facing extinction, and your book was printed ten or more years ago. Also, maybe you weren’t the first to want information on foxes. Are you going to wait two weeks to for the books to come back in so you can read about them? Are you going to visit other libraries? If you have a time limit, like, say, a report due in two weeks, then you don’t have the option of waiting for your book to come back. You could try asking someone who knows a lot about foxes, but if you live in Florida, what are the chances of running into an Alaskan fox trapper on the street?

When the internet was first reaching popularity, teachers told students that they would not accept papers written using the internet as a source. The reason? “Anybody can post anything on the internet”. At the time, when trust was low, that was completely valid. Now, teachers are allowing students to harvest their data from the internet, but most still require at least one library find. A problem we’re seeing now, however, is that a lot of students are plagerizing work directly from Wikipedia and printing it as their own work.

But what does this have to do with content? We’re getting to that.

The internet is so full of information, that it’s easy to forget that you need to write your own information if you’re planning on selling products online. But simply think about it - what are people doing online? Most of them are looking for information. This is still the information age. Say a person is looking for product reviews on a few different cell phones they’re thinking about buying. The best way to offer the information is to have all the specifications of each phone listed out in an easy to read format, and then offer the product reviews. Smart websites also have a compare feature, which lists out the various aspects of what a phone can do in a chart and lists each model and you can easily figure out what phone offers the features you want and their relative costs. Doesn’t that sound useful? Wouldn’t you want to re-visit that page later for reference if someone asked you about phones or why you chose the phone you did choose? If the page was kept up to date, technophiles would frequent that page rather often, checking new features and new phones. If that same page also sold phones, they’d have a nice captive audience to sell them to. Why would people buy from them versus another website that might have lower prices? Trust. If someone trusts your information, they also trust that you’re not going to rip them off with whatever you’re selling. Buying a product over the internet requires a lot of trust. Trusting that the website company is going to be there next week and next month and next year will go a long way towards trusting that the company will take your money and give you the product you want in a timely manner, and a website company that has taken the time to put together that kind of comprehensive information is less likely to disappear overnight.

Building trust with your customers and providing useful information should be the main reason you put content on a website, but now I’m going to tell you of a few more reasons to do so.

How do people gain link popularity? Reciprocal linking? Paid links? Those do work, to varying degrees, and there are certain advantages, such as getting to choose your link’s anchor text and where exactly it points to, but building links on your own in that manner is a long and labor intensive process. If you spent half that time on building out your content into something people would want to use and refer to later, you could very easily get links from all over the web from people who appreciate the work you’ve put in to your website content.  (You will hear this kind of quality content that people find on their own and want to link to referred to as “link bait”)

The disadvantage is that people could, possibly, work to link to your site using words or phrases you don’t want to be associated with, like “scam artist” or “miserable failure“. These kinds of pranks are unlikely, however, requiring hundreds of thousands of links from people of many different IP addresses to acheive, and Google claims that it can’t happen anymore due to a change in their algorythms. The only change in algorythm that would make sense to prevent that kind of Google prank would be for the search engines to verify that the keywords you are getting links from happen to also be somewhere on the content of your site, and bonus if the keywords are on the page that the link is pointing to. (thus, another reason why it’s such a good idea to build out your content.)

The best kind of links come from sites that have a high amount of authority, and it’s difficult to get links from sites like that even if your site has something of value to offer (like comprehensive comparison charts for cell phones). It’s next to impossible to get links from authority sites if you have a site with next to no good information on it. If you were an authority site, and people came to your site trusting you to have great information and links to other sites that have fantastic information, you would be very picky about what sites you would link to. If you started linking willy-nilly, you would lose a lot of trust from your regular patrons, and your site would start to lose value. These are the things that authority sites think about, and this is why it’s so difficult to get links from sites like these.

Have I convinced you yet of the importance of valuable information being presented as content on your website?

Here are a few phrases I hear quite often:

“I don’t have time to write all that!” or “I’m not a writer!” or “I don’t actually know anything about my products other than what came in the sample sales text when I signed up to be a reseller…”

If you really don’t have time or can’t, you’ll need to hire someone to write things for you. If you can’t find someone who’s already an expert on whatever products you are offering, you will need to find someone willing to research your products for you, looking up all the information and constructing a bunch of valuable text. Just ignoring the issue of relevant content won’t help your site at all. Constructing a website that has no content is just like building a car with rusty razorblades for seats. The car works but why on earth would anyone ever get in it?

What challenges have you faced when it comes to content writing?