Top Tips on Writing Great Content

Long gone is the time when online content meant a piece of writing crammed full of keywords that didn’t make a lot of sense and generally lacked substance and meaning. Today we have the power to write articles that allow us to show off a bit of our creative flair and passion for writing. We are writing articles that we want to write and that our readers want to read.

However we mustn’t take for granted that our readers want to read everything we write, regardless of how proud we are of it. There is a certain art to keeping your readers hanging on to your every word…

So here are some tips to help you create great content.

Magnetic Headlines

The headline is the first chance you get to grab your audience’s attention and stop them from hitting that evil back button. Without a compelling title, your whole article will be bypassed and all those words you wrote may as well not even exist. So having a good headline is critical, and once you have someone’s attention, the concept of keeping them interested must carry on sentence after sentence right up until the last word of your article.

Humour

Humour is a great way to lighten the mood; if you make them laugh people are bound to read on. Everyone loves a bit of tongue in cheek and the odd innuendo here and there. However humour shouldn’t be forced, and if you have sat twiddling your thumbs trying to think of a great play on words to add to your article, chances are it’s not going to be as hilarious as you may think. Humour needs to come naturally and flow with your text, and remember, it needs to be tasteful! If you are writing to promote a new fancy dress website then you are quite safe to drop a few jokes in, however if it is a funeral directors website you might want to steer clear of any puns!

Don’t Bombard Your Audience with Technical Terms

There is always a risk, when trying to explain something to your audience, that you will bore your readers to death (something that hopefully isn’t happening while you read this!) so make sure your writing isn’t too heavy. Try to explain things in the simplest way but be careful not to come across as patronising.

Bullet points are your friend

You know yourself that when you see a big chunk of text your heart sinks and you don’t look forward to trawling through the endless lines of text. Bullet points break the article up and if you can get keywords into them they have a better chance of being read.

How To’s and Top Tips are the Way Forward

How many times have you tried and failed to do some DIY in the home or attempted to cook something different only for it to go horribly wrong? For many people their first port of call is to google ‘how to put up a shelf’ or ‘tips on cooking a great steak’ – either that or they call their mum! This is why top tips and how to guides are great not just for us to write, but a great way of boosting SEO and keywords. Once you have got your audience to read your article, hopefully you can go on to successfully entice them to delve further into your site and check out your products and service – and they have learnt how to successfully complete their DIY!

Intriguing Sub-headings

Like bullet points, they will break up your text and an interesting sub-heading will make your reader want to carry on reading through your content. The quirkier the sub-heading the more attention it will attract.

Remember: Your Content Is Still There to Do Its Job

Use call-to actions to remind the reader what they are reading and why. Call-to-actions are a natural way of slipping in those all-important key words and giving the reader a helpful nudge towards purchasing products or signing up to your website.

Although we have been allowed to unleash our creative sides and get a bit loco with our writing we still need to remember the fundamental reason we are writing our content, to get the keywords performing and to boost SEO for the website.

Written by Meredith Watts on behalf of Creare; a leading SEO company that works with you to improve your business ranking by using various techniques from social media to article marketing.