• Rewritten content: if you (or your content writers) have rewritten someone else’s content and placed it on your site, or you have multiple sites with rewritten versions of your own content, the Google Panda algorithm may have detected it.
• Poor English: those cheap articles you bought from content writers in India for $2 each might be the problem. Google now looks at the quality of the language and the grammar. And of course, when you buy cheap articles you also run the risk that they have been rewritten. Use good content writers. 

We’ve been seeing the results of the Google algorithm changes that relate to content for some weeks now – we’re getting requests to replace shoddy content. Site owners with low quality content are losing visitors and income as a result of their sites dropping to somewhere past nowhere in the organic listings.

While many have realised that their content is the problem, others are no doubt still scratching their heads. And there are some who still aren’t getting it – we’ve been asked more than once if we can ‘spin’ the offending content. D’oh! That’s what got you into trouble in the first place!

What should you do if your site has been penalised? Remove the offending content and replace it with high quality, useful, original material. Yes, if you’re used to paying $2 an article and if you have a hundred pages to replace, it’s definitely going to hurt.

Can you afford to replace your content? If your site was generating an income a better question would be – can you afford not to?

Our content writers will be wondering the same thing because they’ll be busy writing about all things Santa well before the decorations appear and debates about who’s hosting the Christmas Dinner begin. In fact, we’ve already started writing – this year we’re helping the Christmas Warehouse prepare their website content.

Now that could be handy! The site is jam-packed full of Christmas trees, Christmas lights and Christmas decorations and all the other things you might need for the season of joy and jolly – and yes, you can order online. So if you’re going to be as busy as we are in November and December and you won’t have the time to run around organising everything from gift wrapping to fairy lights, table trimmings and trees, you’ll be able to jump online and save stacks of time. And if trying to park in a busy shopping centre sends your stress level skyrocketing as it does mine, shopping online might save your sanity too!

Of course, if you’ve been so busy that you feel the need to escape your office, if only for a little while, look for one of the huge Christmas Warehouse stores that will open up in September. You’ll be able be get a huge dose of Christmas spirit (and everything else you’re likely to need) in the one place without leaving your email inbox alone for too long.

All our content writers are based in Australia. They are professional writers with a broad range of marketing and PR experience between them. All have university degrees.

In the two years we’ve been operating our content writers have written thousands of articles and blog posts for clients in Australia, the US and Europe. We’ve dealt with an extraordinary range of topics too so whether you need a content writer who understands real estate, insurance, parenting, pets, or just about anything in-between, we’ll have a content writer who is up to the job.

Need training materials for an online course? No problem. We have a content writer with a PhD in Education and a strong marketing background who specialises in education and technology topics, and the preparation of course materials.

Need a content writer for health related topics? No problem. One of our writers has a Bachelor of Health Science degree in addition to her writing credentials.

Several writers have a knack for comedy writing so if you want to have fun with your readers, we’ve got you covered there too.

No matter what you’re looking for in a content writer, the chances are we can help. Send through an enquiry via the contact form and tell us what you need!

Quality of the Written Content

A poorly written website peppered with grammatical errors immediately suggests three things:

• The site owner doesn’t care and/or
• The business doesn’t have enough funds to pay a content writer
• Is this a foreign website pretending to be local?

Those aren’t very comforting thoughts for someone considering paying you for a product or service. They’ll go on to think “Is this site legitimate? Will I receive the goods? Is it a fly-by-night site? I’d better not take the risk.”

And all that will happen in just a few seconds.

Quantity of Content on Your Website

If you have only two or three pages of content on your site, and very little information on those pages, it can suggest to visitors that your business is very new or doesn’t have much to offer them. It’s also very likely that your visitors can’t find the answers to any questions they may have about your products or services, or how you do business. Remember, most people won’t contact you to ask – they’ll just click off and find another site that contains website content that does answer their questions. People want to feel at least a bit comfortable about the credibility of your business before they contact you.

Contact Details and About Us

Many will disagree with me but I believe that having your contact details and a little information about who you are on your website is absolutely vital for credibility if you’re a small business. Aren’t you just a little suspicious of businesses that have only a contact form and no details as to who is operating the business or where they are operating from?

Is your website content failing the visitor credibility check? Perhaps it’s time to call in a content writer!

Guest Posting

Guest posting is one of the best ways you can use content. It has a lot of SEO benefits and provides a valuable resource for gaining more traffic and exposure to your website.

A guest post is an article that you write for another website. It is written in a way that is valuable to the website owner’s readers but also is promoting your website in an indirect way. Guest posts have to be very informational and high quality, and should not be promotional in any way. When you do a guest post, you are usually allowed a link or two back to your site, and this link is what is called a back-link. These are very valuable for your site because Google looks at how many back-links your site has as a way of judging its importance and ranking your website in its search engine.

That being said, you should never look at guest posting as link building, but rather an opportunity to provide readers with good, solid information that they perhaps did not know before. The back-link acquired should be the cream on the cake. If you approach guest posting purely as a link building exercise, then you’ll see your efforts wasted because if the content isn’t good, it won’t be read, and may not even be published.

Article Directory Marketing

Article directory marketing isn’t for everybody. There was a time when it was a much more valuable tool used to create marketing funnels as well as build links but that time is now over. However it can still be an extremely valuable source for creating traffic funnels if you are able to do it at a level that will be useful. Only at a high volume is article directory marketing valuable, so if you don’t have the time or money it takes to create articles on a large scale and then submit them to article directories, you probably should not go this route.

Submitting many articles to many different article directories gives you the ability to appear high in the search rankings for many different titles and searches. If you have tons of articles that rank high in the search engines through article directories, then you will be able to pull a lot of traffic from them alone because article directories allow you to add links to your web site in the articles or article resource box.

Another good use for article directories is to link to guest posts that you have posted on other websites. This will help keep the guest posts indexed and cached more often, thus allowing them to provide more ‘link juice’ back to your site.

On-Site Content Creation

This will be the most important part of your content creation campaign. There are a variety of ways you can meet your content creation needs. You can hire in-house writers or you can outsource your work. In my experience, outsourcing your work will usually end up costing less time and money. Time because you won’t have to deal with interviewing, hiring, and maintaining writers – a very tedious job – and money because individual writers usually charge more per word than content creation companies do. It’s also likely that you’ll have a faster turnaround time if you hire a company for content writing services.

Your keywords will be the heart of your web site, and you want to make sure that you are aiming at the right keywords – the keywords that are going to best help you convert traffic into dollars. Your on-site content should have a healthy density of the keyword phrases that you have decided to use. The content however should not just be engineered for the search engines, but with the readers in mind as well. As long as you remember that you are trying to please your readers as well as Google, you will be fine.

Your website content needs will certainly keep you busy while you are trying to establish your website. The key thing to remember if you want to be successful with your content is that you should always choose quality over quantity.

About the Author:

Philip Rudy helps run and maintain inetzeal.net, which is a company that provides SEO services.

• Providing a list of suggested topics can help direct the writers and ensure you get exactly the type of articles you had in mind. If you find coming up with ideas difficult, ask the writing service to send you some proposed topics for approval.
• Choosing keywords for at least some of your articles can help with your SEO.
• Are you ordering short articles to save money? Short posts work well for some topics but more complex subject matter calls for longer posts. If you’re on a tight budget you might be better off ordering less articles of a larger word count to ensure your posts contain enough information to be useful to your website visitors. If your content writers are writing short useless posts, you could be wasting your money.
• Cheaper isn’t always better – choosing a cheap as chips writing service might save you money but if the writers’ work is woeful it could be doing your website more harm than good by giving your readers a poor impression of your business.
• Do you frequently change the material the writers send you? If you have to edit the articles and constantly fix errors then you’re not getting value for money and you probably should be looking for another content writing service. If it’s simply that you don’t like the style or tone of the articles, tell the service what you don’t like next time you order – most content writers can easily adjust their style to suit and it will save you time and effort. 

If your intention is to build up a content rich business website and increase visitor volume over time, content writers who consistently provide you with quality optimized articles at a reasonable price will give you the best value for your dollar.

Here are a few content writing tips to help you avoid the common mistakes business owners make when they write their own website content. 

• Don’t write the type of BS you’d find on a big corporate or government website. (I’m sorry but BS is BS isn’t it?) You have to think about who your prospective customers are likely to be – if most of them are other small business owners or average homeowners they get more than enough BS. They want good clear information about who you are, what you do, and how you can help them. Plain English and a conversational style works well for the majority of small business websites.
• Understand the impatient nature of people looking for goods and services on the Internet. They’ll have questions about your products or services and you need to answer as many of them as you can with your website content lest they go looking elsewhere for the information they need.
• Don’t write volumes. About 300-500 words per page is considered to be a good amount – enough to get the information across and not enough to make visitors’ eyes glaze over before they get to the end.
• When it comes to the ‘About Us’ page don’t be shy! People read this page to find out if you sound like a legitimate, sound, trustworthy, and professional business they would like to use. The content on that page needs to give them enough information to form an opinion on that subject. Show off your credentials but always keep in mind that prospective customers are more interested in how your experience and professionalism will benefit them, than in you personally, or your business.
• Learn about keywords and how important it is to have relevant keywords in your website content. In brief, keywords are the search terms people use on the Internet to find what they’re looking for. If people were looking for the services you offer, what phrases would they use?
• Understand how the Internet works – search engines ‘crawl’ the web daily looking for new content. When they find it they index it according to what it seems to be about. They establish this by ‘reading’ the website and looking for phrases that appear to be significant. If the relevant keyword phrases aren’t contained in your website content, the search engines can’t index your site properly – and that means that when somebody types in the popular keyword phrases for your industry (for example, “plumbers Sydney” or “corporate video production”) your site may not come up at all.
• Learn where to include keywords in your website content. Search engines quickly scan web pages to see what they’re about, particularly looking at titles, headings and opening sentences as these tend to be indicative of what a page is about.

The written content on your website is only one part of the equation when it comes to establishing a successful website. You’ve probably heard the term ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (SEO) and this refers to the practice of optimising websites so that search engines index as many pages as possible and position them as high up as possible in the organic search results for the right keywords.

While your written website content plays a large role in SEO, it’s only one of several important factors. As with the content writing, if you aren’t in a position to hire a professional to do the SEO on your website, you’ll need to learn as much about SEO as you can – including how to get backlinks to your website how to link your internal site pages.

Writing your own content and learning about SEO can be time consuming and frustrating but at the end of the day, even if you decide to outsource your content writing, understanding what is involved can only benefit your website and your business.

The third question is easy to answer – article writers do it to earn money. For some it’s virtually a full time occupation and for others, it’s a ‘second job’ or a means of earning a part time income to supplement their partner’s wage. Who they are and where they come from depends on the article writing service you use, where the article writing service is based, and how cheaply they offer their services.

Who Writes Articles?

Article writers in general vary from average individuals with basic to good typing and written communication skills through to professional writers who hold university degrees. Article writing work is highly sort after as it’s an activity that can be done from the comfort of home and at any hour of the day or night that suits the writer. It’s paid per article, so writers with a fast typing speed, good general knowledge and the ability to generate ideas quickly can earn much more than others.

The types of individuals who work for any writing service depends on where the service is based, the standard of work they accept from writers and the rate they pay their writers. You’d be unlikely to find degree holding writers from Australia (or for that matter anyone here with writing skills) working for a writing service based in India and offering to them pay $1 for 500 word articles or even working for a US article writing service offering $5.

Within Australia the cost of articles varies, but with good article writers now in demand, you’re unlikely find them working for the article writing services that offer very cheap articles. However, anyone with a reasonable command of the English language can often write well enough to satisfy the standards of cheaper services.

Our own article writers are quite exceptional. Most hold professional writing or communication degrees. Many are also work from home mums and a few have taken up article writing because it allows them to earn a flexible income while they follow a creative passion or travel. Because our standards are high our writers tend to have a great deal of experience, in writing, in business or the workforce, and in life. Many have opted to relinquish well paid positions to create an improved lifestyle for themselves and their family. Yet we’re able to offer moderately priced articles because our writers are also quick on the keyboard and therefore able to earn a decent income as an article writer.

Where Are the Article Writers?

In general, you’ll find article writers working from home everywhere from India to the US to Australia and Europe and just about everywhere else. Wherever there is a need for website content, you’ll find article writers!

Our article writers are all based in Australia. That’s largely because of the high standards we require but also because there are tax implications in hiring people from overseas. For example, an article writer based in the US and working for an article writing service here may have to pay tax in both countries. Of course, companies in some countries (possibly even this one) outsource work to India to take advantage of the low rates.

The problem is that if you check out some of the article writing services based in India you’ll read some interesting things on their websites. My favourite is “our rates for content writing services are ducked at $4, even a beginner would be ready to pooch our cheek.” Enough said! To their credit, article writers in India are probably fabulous writers in their first language.

Personally, I think article writing is the best job in the world. It was not so very long ago that regular paid work for writers (other than screenwriters, technical writers and journalists) was rare. Now, thanks largely to the arrival of the ‘blog’ and online article directories, many more writers can earn a living working from home as article writers.

Writing services are springing up everywhere. There are article and blog writing services, tender writing services, letter and report writing and resume services. The demand for good freelance writers has never been higher and it’s likely to intensify in the coming years.

Why has there been such a turnaround? Several factors have brought about this delightful situation for freelance writers.

The Internet

With the arrival of the Internet came the company website and the need for content. Of course, not understanding the need for SEO many businesses initially wrote their own content (and many still attempt it) but it wasn’t long before specialist website content writers and content writing services began to emerge.

Then the ‘blog’ was born. Initially a format for personal online journals, blogging was quickly taken up by smart business owners as a means of adding content to their website and marketing their business. Article directories began to appear and became a marketing and SEO tool. Soon enough, there was paid work for article and blog writers as many business website owners weren’t able to write the content they needed. Article and blog writing services quickly emerged.

In order to get content the content they needed some article sites began offering a revenue share arrangement to contributing writers while others offered freelance writers a new avenue through which they could sell their articles.

As the Internet became a more competitive environment it became harder for businesses to get noticed. To compete, you had to have content and the more you had the better. The only problem was that by that stage of the game, there was no longer a plentiful supply of people who could write well.

The Decline of Writing Skills

Whether you blame it on a lax education system, the emergence of computer games, email, the Internet, text messaging or all of those things combined, there’s little doubt that the average person’s writing skills aren’t what they used to be.

The once popular pastime of reading began to lose ground to television decades ago but with advances in technology, it lost even more to computer games and the Internet. Reading tends to inspire writing, so it’s only logical that with less people interested in reading, fewer people would be inspired to write.

Written communication took a big hit with emails quickly replacing personal letters and even many business communications. Text messaging arrived on the scene and in no time at all people became used to writing short, sharp communications often containing abbreviations as they sent emails, posted comments on blogs and forums, and hammered out quick text messages.

It’s possibly no great surprise that writing skills have declined so much and so quickly. Nobody is getting much practice! And if recent reports of students outsourcing essays and assignments to India are true (and with so many essay writing services around, we have to assume they are) things aren’t going to improve any time soon.

Of course, existing freelance writers are ‘LOL’ at this point and they’ll soon be laughing even louder.

Why Writers Are Laughing

While a general decline in writing skills is really no laughing matter, skilled writers will have trouble not laughing in a society where demand for and value of their skills are rapidly increasing.

More and more individuals are setting up online businesses, taking up the opportunities the Internet offers to work from home running e-stores, Adsense websites, and other businesses that generate semi-passive income. Even businesses that are predominantly land based usually find it necessary to have a ‘web presence’ so they too require web content, along with a variety of other written material which is becoming ever more difficult to produce in-house. Site and business owners capable of writing themselves are often too busy to do it and need to hire freelance writers or outsource to writing services. More content, article and blog writing services are likely to emerge as a result.

It seem highly likely that the demand for writers will continue to rise while writing skills continue to decline – and that’s a promising equation for freelance writers and writing services!

As any successful small business operator will tell you, your reception area, be it online or on land, is your best and sometimes only opportunity to create that all important first impression – and that initial analysis of your business by prospective customers can be a significant factor in their decision on whether or not to become your customer. What this means of course is that your website content needs to fill the role of a reception area and receptionist.

That can be easier said than done! Your website needs to:

• Welcome visitors – for a website this means having the information prospective customers are most likely to want in a prominent position. Your home page will be answering the question “can I help you?” It needs to reply to prospective customers with a yes!
• Answer visitors’ questions – you need to anticipate visitor questions and answer them somewhere on your site. Very commonly asked questions should be covered by your main page content but if people tend to ask a range of questions, a frequently asked questions page should be considered.
• Present well – website design is very important in this regard but so too is the presentation of the text on your page. A clutter of text that is difficult to read can send visitors away quickly. An untidy reception can make you appear inefficient – as can spelling errors and poor grammar on your website pages.
• Announce your qualifications and relevant licenses – many small businesses display registrations, licenses and qualifications in the reception area so visitors can see they’re dealing with a legitimate and professional business. Websites usually have an ‘about us’ page and this is where visitors tend to go to establish your credentials and assure themselves that you’re a professional outfit. Wishy washy blurb that doesn’t say who you are or indicate your credentials won’t impress those visitors who click onto that page to find out more about your business.
• Encourage visitors to use your services or product – your content is your sales representative as well as your receptionist!

There are of course, many other factors that are important when it comes to your written website content including:

• Search engine optimisation – your text needs to contain words that help search engines identify what your site is about and index your pages appropriately so customers can find your website.
• Tone and style – the tone and style of a large legal firm’s website will be vastly different that of a website that sells costumes, toys or funny t-shirts. Some small businesses, particularly those presenting hand made or home made products, may benefit by incorporating the operator’s personality into their website. Others want to avoid giving the impression that they’re a one or two person show.

Paying for Quality Website Content

The cost of professionally written website content can seem high however when you consider your web pages as your receptionist – one who works 365 days a year, 24 hours a day – a few hundred dollars spent to construct website content that welcomes and sells your services is quite a bargain.