Content Building: How to Develop Quality Content for Your Site Visitors.

I suspect you could ask ten different content builders what the best way to generate quality content for your website is and you would get ten different answers, or at least 10x variations of similar methodologies. The simple answer is; build content relevant to your site topic and optimize your content so visitors find what they are looking for. In order to get repeat visitors be sure your content is unique and will likely prompt someone to bookmark your page(s). The Holy Grail is having your visitors email your pages to others because your content tells a story or illuminates something worth sharing. This is no easy task, but with repeated failures and hard work the chances of building a quality content site is attainable by anyone.

Some tips for building quality content are:

1) Do your research: for every page you add to your site be sure to research the topic or sub-topics thoroughly. Use resources such as; search engines, online encyclopedias, and experts in the field.

2) Write it out: in your own words. It is perfectly ok to reformulate content from other sources, combine ideas, and create your own findings from other sources. However, if it is someone else’s idea (not general knowledge), you must credit the source. Try not copy and paste content into your pages; unless you plan on giving credit to the source.

3) Have it reviewed: That’s right, get someone you trust to read over and edit your work. Make sure it is someone who has an excellent grasp of the language you are writing in and can take the time to verify your content as unique and non-misleading.

4) Monitor your site: and gauge which pages are being perused the most. As traffic grows are your visitors finding certain pages more often than others? This is a good way to determine what content is good and what content is not so good. This will help you shed the crap while helping you build on good content pages your visitors frequent.

These are four general steps. There is much more you can do to improve the quality of your content and website(s). One the more difficult things you can do which will add credibility to your content is connect independent facts or data and in turn present these facts or data in a way which accurately represents each source. In other words, take two or more indisputable analyses and make a correlation or a new analogy based upon the results of the analyses. Confused yet? I am. This may be easier to explain with an example:

The domain Cessation.com is under development and as part of the content building process we found a number of research studies outlining statistics related to smoking; i.e. mortality rates, lung cancer deaths, and other negative effects from smoking. In each case the research highlighted specific results relative the content of the site in which we compiled the data. By reviewing each set of data we were able to answer a subset of questions by combining datasets and doing the simple math to get a unique piece of content generated by the Cessation.com content team (which is me). The two statements we make at the site are:

In 2007 cessation.com estimates smoking will lead to 139,539 lung cancer deaths in the United States.

In 2007, cessation.com estimates smoking will lead to 1,160,461 lung cancer deaths for the rest of the developed world.

This data was not directly offered by any of the sources we retrieved data from. Rather, we were able to combine datasets and answer specific questions through common relationships across all data.

This is just one example of creating unique content, through preexisting datasets. In the coming weeks I hope to delve a bit deeper into the four points noted above. Creating content can be time consuming and tedious. However, the rewards can lead to better traffic at your sites, better search engine rankings, and ultimately higher profits (If money is your game).