Category Archives: Web Content

A mobile responsive website layout is far better than creating separate websites

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Having a mobile website is no longer an option; every website these days needs to look good and be easy-to-use on mobile devices, may it be tablets or smart phones.

Consequently, most of the websites have two versions. One layout for computers and laptops, and another for mobile devices, mostly of the type http://mobile.domainname.com.

Although this solves your purpose, you end up creating and maintaining two websites. This not only creates duplicate content (and hence problems with your search engine rankings), it also creates duplicate work. Whenever you update your website, you need to update both the versions.

Even if you are cool about maintaining two versions of the same website, search engines like Google aren’t very pleased with your tactic. They thing that you are creating duplicate content – enhancing your content quantity artificially – and hence, begin to penalize you for it.

What’s the solution? Creating mobile responsive website layouts.

It means having a single layout that scales up and down according to the dimensions of the screen. It may seem a bit difficult compared to creating two separate websites, but once you have opted out, it is better for you both in terms of maintenance as well as avoiding to create duplicate content.

There are many ways you can create mobile responsive website layouts. If you use WordPress to maintain your website, like CredibleContent and it’s blog, you can easily get (or get it developed) a theme that seamlessly scales according to the device currently being used to access the website. I have used the latest TwentyTwelve theme from WordPress (this theme is developed from a mobile-first approach) and created a child theme to make it look like my own layout. You can check out by increasing and decreasing the width of your browser window (or simply load my website using your mobile device) and check out how the design scales according to the width.


Click to enlarge


Click to enlarge

As you can see the layout looks normal when the browser is wide enough but as the width becomes narrower the sidebar disappears and even the top navigation bar turns into a “Menu” button. This is a single stylesheet rather than giving visitors a separate URL.

But even if you are not using WordPress you can ask your web designer to create a mobile responsive website layout rather than creating multiple URLs for multiple devices.

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Do you design your website around your content?

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As a web designer do you design your websites around the content your client is going to use to communicate his or her message and make useful information available to its visitors, or do you first create the design and then want the content to fit into that?

If you’re doing the latter, you are not alone, and you’re also denying your client the ability to provide enough information to his or her customers and clients.

No matter what is the business, ultimately it is the content that generates leads and sales. People need to know what you stand for. They need to know what your product or service can deliver. They want to be able to trust you and they can only trust you if they can find the right information on your website.

Sure, when they come to your website for the first time they may get impressed by the design and layout but eventually they will look for the information they need. By merely focusing on the layout you are not going to be able to sell.

So whenever you are designing a website, take into consideration how your layout is going to accommodate the written content, whether it is on the homepage or other pages.

I myself have gone through such experiences. There are many clients – especially those who have purchased a ready-made template – who want me to fit content into the template no matter if on one page they can just have a single paragraph. No harm in having single-paragraph pages by the way, but what if you need to say more? We are not talking about Twitter where you always have to use 140 characters. Sometimes people need to know more. For that you need to publish multiple paragraphs.

This is why, no matter how attractive your design is, unless it is able to scale according to the content you want to publish, it is of no use. Whether you are a web designer or you are purchasing an off-the-shelf template, make sure that the layout accommodates content sections that can expand vertically to accommodate as much content as possible. Don’t use a design that does not accommodate your content well.

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Choosing the right keywords for content marketing

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What is content marketing? It is claimed that content drives the Internet. Does it then make content marketing too this powerful? Are right keywords all that essential to successful content marketing? And how can we choose the right keywords for content marketing? So many questions! Come, let us find a few answers.

How different Content Marketing is and the principles of content marketing

As opposed to traditional marketing, content marketing is all about sharing quality information that is relevant and current, with your prospective customers and clients. Whereas the traditional marketing uses interruption techniques, content marketing will gently but firmly hold the consumers’ attention and build brand loyalty. This is done more by educating the customer and letting him/her recognize the advantages of the product/service and go for it with the conviction of right choice. Knowing more about the product/service, trusting and starting to like it will be the way content marketing works.

The idea of creating and sharing content is aimed at rather gentle persuasion, targeting an intelligent and informed audience to let them accept the brand as a thought leader and industry expert. This shared content will grab a potential customer’s attention, make him read it, think about it and decide after learning all about it. Most of the content will aim at solving their problem along with entertaining them and make them feel good all over.

Some of the different forms of content marketing are

  • Custom publishing – Custom media
  • Branded entertainment – Branded content
  • Database marketing
  • Corporate media – Corporate publishing
  • Corporate journalism

What is the importance of keywords in content marketing?

Online information that is concisely and succinctly expressed and worded elegantly and interestingly will be the way content is going to be presented. But how to get the customer know about the content? What will make him/her visit your site? Videos, blogging or PDFs are all great platforms but the most essential will be the right keywords that will drive the traffic towards your content. The keywords should be such that the search engines are able to index and rank your website according to the relevant search terms being used by their users; your website is then rated high in SEO.

Choosing the right keywords for content marketing

Right keywords are those:

  • Words that fit as header tags (HI, H2, H3 etc) to facilitate the search engines to pick them up; especially the H1 tag carries a lot of weight.
  • Words that fit individually as page tags depending on what is on that page.
  • Words that can flow naturally and meaningfully with the content but yet can be repeated for the required density without an obvious put-on effect.
  • Words that can be bolded and italicised where needed fitting with meaningful flowing text.
  • The operative principle is that written text and chosen keywords present a meaningful and naturally flowing text.

Well, it may not be an exaggeration if tomorrow more than 80% of marketing strategy will be via content marketing. Content marketing creates so much credibility and trust with such persuasive authority that there will be no sales resistance left against it.

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Keep your SEO goals in mind while creating your content writing strategy

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It doesn’t help if you already have lots of content and then you realize that you are not targeting the right keywords. Although no situation is hopeless you can save yourself lots of time, and money, if you define your SEO goals properly. Make a list of keywords and keyword phrases you’d like to incorporate and then start generating your content around them.

There is also a business benefit of clearly defining your SEO goals — it keeps you focused. You know what sort of content you require for your website and blog and what you should avoid; yes, misplaced content is bad for SEO.

How do you keep your content SEO-focused?

  • Create titles with your keywords. Your page titles are very important. They appear in the search engine result pages as hyperlinks when people search for the relevant terms. People click more on the links that carry the search terms they’ve just used. Even when people promote your content on social networking websites or link your your pages and blog posts they normally copy/paste your title — this associates these keywords with your brand.
  • Use your keywords and key phrases when communicating your ideas. This tells the search engines that you have lots of content associated with the search term being currently used. If you provide content writing services then you should be talking about this subject a lot on your blog or website. But do it naturally; there is no need to use your relevant keywords excessively — this gets you penalized by almost all search engines.
  • Link to your other pages not just the home page. Your different pages contain different bits of information and whenever you feel a particular phrase can be linked to a page giving more information about that phrase, create a link. It makes it easier for the search engine crawlers to reach other pages and it also creases the relevancy of your less prominent pages.

The basic idea of creating SEO-focused content strategy is keeping you focused and help you focus on the right search terms.

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Why your website or blog needs unique content

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There are basically two reasons why your website or blog needs unique, fresh content: the search engines prefer unique content compared to commonly and easily found content, and people who are active on various social media and networking websites prefer to promote something unique, something highly useful and something that attracts immediate attention.

Search engines looking for unique content

Various search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! are constantly competing with each other. Just because they get millions of visitors daily don’t assume they have it easy. Even a small fluctuation means millions of ad dollars lost. So they are constantly trying to improve their ranking algorithms and trying to find and index content that is unique.

The uniqueness and the usefulness of the content they find for their users keep those users from switching over to another search engine. Why would the users use a search engine that finds the same stuff that can be found on scores of other websites? Hence, in order to get higher rankings you have to make sure that the content published on your website or blog is unique as well as highly relevant.

Social media users want to promote unique content

Nobody likes to promote content that is being promoted by 500 other users. Social media websites can bring you tons of traffic if you can lure their users to your website by providing highly interesting, topical and relevant content that they cannot find anywhere else. But do they promote your links just for altruistic reasons? Not at all.

Take for instance Twitter and Facebook. Why do people keep posting interesting links on these websites? They want to show that they can locate and share interesting stuff. They want to be useful to their followers and fans. This way, if they are posting 10 useful links from other websites and blogs, they can also post a few from their own website without looking spammy. Besides, on Twitter, interesting tweets get retweeted and this is beneficial both to the owner of the link and the one who tweets it because both gain exposure.

Then there is conventional logic too. When you publish useful content on your website it tells your visitors that you take pains to keep them informed. If you share important information with them you establish yourself as an authority, and in more than 99% cases authority brings respect and trust, and respect and trust leads to loyal customers and clients.

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