Trying to establish your business in the digital realm is no walk in the park. If you’re a business owner and you’re not considering the content that you are producing, then you need to re-think your online strategy and pay close attention to a few of the golden rules detailed here. Content is the hidden key to your online success, whether you’re using it to get to the top of Google or using it to promote your products and services. Read on to find out why content holds all the power and why you need to play by these rules.

Content is king!

First, I want to show you why content is the most powerful tool you have. So, to do that, I want you to perform a little imaginative exercise. Close your eyes and picture the internet without content. Now, close your eyes and picture the rest of the world without content. What do you have left? A massive void of nothingness that doesn’t disclose anything.

That is the power of content. It’s everywhere, from the information on your website or brochures to the words written on bus stop ads. Without content, the world wouldn’t have a voice! So, now that’s established, let’s have a look at the golden rules.

Rule number 1 – Write for the human user

I’ve seen so many businesses get side-tracked with search engine optimisation (SEO) that they completely forget about the humans that have to read through their content. If you don’t write your content for the human user, then you’re doing nothing to attract them to your business.

SEO is important, but you are doing your SEO to attract more traffic to your website. So if people arrive at your site and see a load of jibberish that doesn’t give any value to them, then they’ll soon be heading elsewhere. Focus on writing informative, engaging, and useful information for your visitors and they’ll be coming back for more. At the end of the day, the best SEO is natural SEO.

Rule number 2 – Use keywords sparingly

This is another one of the downfalls of many businesses online marketing campaigns. Keywords are important for SEO, there’s no doubt about that, but spamming keywords like they are the only words you’ve ever learned will do nothing but damage your efforts. Plus, your visitors are going to have a hard time reading your content if the keywords are in there unnaturally.

The art of ‘keyword stuffing’ is an SEO technique that has long gone. Google’s algorithm updates (mainly its Panda update) have fully revised the way it gives sites relevance. It can instantly spot the overuse of keywords and will punish your site for it, even banning sites in extreme cases. Instead, use your keywords strategically so the content still flows and can be read naturally. You only need a keyword density of about 1%, which means a keyword should only appear four times in a 400 word article or web page.

Rule number 3 – Break up your content

This golden rule is one to abide by if you ever write content that’s over a few hundred words, or even a few paragraphs. In the online world, people have short attention spans. There are so many clickable distractions littered around the virtual world that can easily see them navigating away from your web page, article, or other content. The best technique you can use to hold their attention is to give them your content in bite-size chunks.

Take this post as an example. I’m placing a bet that you’ve read this far because you could easily see the journey this article would take you on. You have the main heading, the intro text, and then the neat little subsections. This breaks a 700 word article down into easy to digest chunks.

Just imagine if this article was nothing more than a heading and a large chunk of text. You’d either be too scared to start reading, unsure of what the article contained, or you would’ve got a paragraph in, looked at the rest, and thought to yourself ‘will this ever end?’.

If you structure your content so that your readers know exactly where it is going and what it is about, then they’ll be more inclined to read on. Another great technique is to do as I have done here, and make each paragraph only a few sentences long, as this breaks your content down even further, giving you an even greater opportunity to hold those attention spans.

That’s the golden formula

Well, that’s the three golden rules covered. There are other ‘not so golden’ rules too, but if you master these three then you’ll be writing quality, readable content that users can enjoy in no time at all… and you’ll still be doing your all-important SEO. So, what are you waiting for? Get writing and see what you can come up with!