Content – regularly added, up to date and relevant.
A good site has updated content that is relevant to the site and its readers. Regularly adding content not only keeps your readers coming back and your site looking fresh, it also keeps the search engine spiders happy and keeps them coming back to crawl it too.
Content should be original and unique, just copying content from elsewhere on the web is wrong for many reasons.
- It’s not your own work, would you like it if someone copied and used something you had spent time and energy on.
- It won’t be in your style of writing. People write in different ways and tones. If you’re copying content from different places the tone of the content will be different and will be obvious to readers, loosing you credibility.
- Copied content never ranks as well as the original. Search engines are smart and they will pay little respect, if any at all, to content that is copied.
- The original content will have been indexed already and ranked your copied version will just be flagged as duplicate content.
- Lastly web site owners do make checks on whether there content has been copied via sites like copyscape. They are then perfectly within their rights to ask you to remove your copied article. Your site could be black listed or even removed.
I could also go all nerdy and explain that if you’re writing an article and you are keen for to rank in the search engines then your keyword shouldn’t be used more than 20% of your total article. Although this is true if you’re writing good content then you are naturally going to mention the subject you are talking about. As a rough rule of thumb, aim for at least 250 – 300 words per article. If your article has less than this you might struggle not to look spammy with your keywords.
