Avoid Bad Web Page Content
Avoid Bad Webpage Content
Website visitors, like most people are really a self-interested bunch. They avoid websites that do not offer material that will benefit them, not sign on to webinars that they believe would bore them to death, and definitely reject web page content that does not interest them or answer their need in some way.
Site visitors are definitely not going to read an article, if they believe that reading it will be a waste of their time, even if the author has loaded the article with material that the author believes is of prime importance. If the article is written badly, (i.e. typos, bad grammar, colloquiums, slang and so on ) no site visitor will go beyond the first few lines.
The article may contain real gold in the form of driving tons of paying traffic to a website on page 5 but if the reader is totally bored on page 2 very few people if any will soldier on reading the article.
This raises the question – What exactly is bad content? – The short answer is – Content that website visitors do not like to read. Regretfully, just saying this does not help anyone, especially the content writer. There are different types of lousy content, each with its own reasons for being dull and uninteresting, rather than well polished, sparkling and capable of engaging the reader’s interest.
Search Engine Optimization
From the perspective of online brand building and driving focused ( thus paying ) traffic to a website there’s really nothing like a well thought through and superbly executed SEO effort. Google does rule the Internet due to its indexing power. It’s tops in its ability to deliver the most appropriate website content to a seeker of such content even if the search words keyed in are iffy.
The merger between Yahoo and Bing is an attempt of two good search engines trying their best to challenge the reigning king, Google. Any which way one looks at it, the ability to get website content noticed by search engines through the use of keywords, meta tags, and proper formatting is a vital part of the webpage content creation process.
Regretfully, any SEO article author that simply describes what think is a perfect SEO process, without being able to explain simply and lucidly, exactly how web page content must be structured to meet with the requirements of search engines, will be quickly labeled as boring and useless by a website visitor.
Simply because the reader apparently will not be able to “Take Away’ enough knowledge by reading the article to make appropriate changes to their own web page content to comply with the needs of search engines and get great search engine, result page, ranks.
All too often a ton off SEO articles seem to be little more than keywords and/or key phrases, badly strung together using really strange English grammar, to create contorted English sentences simply to contain the keywords ( or key phrase ) desired. Site visitors make come by, take a quick look but not stick around and opt to do business.
Horribly Used Humor
There seems to be a trend in some website content to be funny, even to the extent of being snarky or sarcastic. You will be able to see this body of work on websites like Something Awful, or Rifftrax DVD’s a series dedicated to making fun of poorly made movies.
Every author seems to imagine that they are clever, witty people, who can turn a fairly dull piece of writing into a biting social commentary or something snarky and sarcastic, all blended into humor. Most of the authors that churn out such content really should not.
Often, their writing comes across as forced, offensive, jaded and just plain bad. If you as an author is suddenly struck by a sentence that has clean humor in it and which will drive a point home please use it. If you are just structuring sentences to blend forced humor in then please don’t use it.
While writing if you’ve got to struggle at adding humor into a sentence, then it’s ever so likely that the humor does not really belong there.
Using Memetics In Article Content
Memetics is a variation in introducing humor and witty repartee in web page content. Memetics is a theory of social information transmission. Memes are really ideas that are passed and replicated between people. In web content memes appear as catchy / snappy sayings that can go viral.
A well-referenced meme can make web page content more entertaining, but a forced meme is often completely misunderstood by the reader and they lose interest and just – Click Away – from the website. Unless there's a compelling reason to include a meme in web page content - don't try.
Sound And Fury, Amounting To Nothing
There are few things that website visitors find more irritating then web page content that is a complete waste of their time. If the web site content is such that it does the site visitor no good at all there will be a reaction and the reaction could be nasty.
Avoid this type of web page content like to plague. The moment it gets out that a specific website has nothing to contribute, that website is finished on the Internet.
Make sure that all web page content adds value to the site visitor, touches their lives in some way, makes their lives easier.
Provide tips on the different uses of a product. Describe a simple maintenance routine that would help keep the product running smoothly for years perhaps. Write a story describing how the website has learned from mistakes. Describe how the website is listening to its site visitors. Ensure that there is web page content that contributes to opening a conversation between the site visitor and the website.
That is truly the magic of great web page content.
Ivan Bayross
Open source Tutorials | Open source training
