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Top 10 do's and don'ts of writing website content

This is our simple top ten guide to the do's and don't of writing website content, in line with the search engines code of ethics.

Website do's

1. Plan your website
2. Write content that is original and keyword rich, (this doesn't mean keyword stuffing) the more interesting it is the more people are likely to link to your website, bookmark your web pages and trust you. [read more about planning and writing your website content]
3. Write meta keywords that are reflective of the content of the page, using terms that are likely to be used when searching for that product or item. [read more about meta keywords]
4. Write meta titles and meta descriptions that are reflective of the webpage, meta titles should be a short statement of the content of the web page . The meta description should be a very brief summary of the web page content. Also making good use of alt tags is both user friendly and helps by adding additional keyword content. [read more about meta tags]
5. Make your website intuitive and easy to navigate.

Website don'ts

6. Don't write your content for the search engines, write your content for your users. Also consider that having great search engine ranking positions is one thing but if your website cannot communicate to the visitor, they won't hang about.
7. Don't fill your content with excessive keywords that make the content difficult to read and understand. (The practice is known as keyword stuffing.)
8. Don't try and hide things from your users that you only want the search engines to see. Search engines can identify text no matter what colour or size don't be tempted to try to get text and links read by the search engines that you try and hide from your visitors (using small fonts, using text that is the same colour as the background etc)
9. Don't use irrelevant keywords in the meta keyword section of the website, part of the crawling process is to find relevance of the meta tags, the alt tags and the content, if they all contradict then the algorithm will not compute a favourable result.
10. Don't create multiple web pages with duplicate content, try wherever possible to change the text.