We’ve talked a lot about “dynamic” web content in terms of having fresh content posted regularly on your site. Indeed, content is king when you want to enhance SEO and increase organic site traffic. The more content, the better. However, you also need to be focused on what type of content you are adding. The writing needs to be strong and the content needs to be UNIQUE.
We can’t stress the importance of unique content enough. So many shop owners will start a blog with the best intentions. They may write a custom article every now and again, but then they start to get lazy and commit one of the worst web sins: copying and pasting text from other sources.
We can understand the thinking. If there’s already a good article online about something pertaining to your business, then why reinvent the wheel? Why take the time to write something fresh when someone else already did the work for you? Unfortunately, Internet plagiarism is rampant and it can actually be bad for your SEO if you simply copy and paste information from other sites.
Why? Because search engines such as Google are very, very sophisticated. Their systems can easily recognize duplicate content and it can actually work against you. If you are simply pulling your information word for word from other online sources, you will not see any positive returns. This is true beyond just your blog. Any page on your site should ideally have content that’s unique to you. If you have a template site, do what you can to customize the content as much as possible.
Something else we often see is blogging services that simply frame other stories on your site. Perhaps they are custom-written articles that are disbursed to all their users or they are just pulling stories from online news feeds. The new content consistently being added to your blog page is good, but it really won’t help that much since it’s the exact same content that can be found on many other sites.
That said, you can use the information found online as reference and inspiration as you write your own stories. Frame the story differently. Use different wording and phrasing. Make it your own by relating it as much as possible to your business, your geographic reach or your target customers.
The point is if you are going to add content your site, don’t just copy and paste it from other sources. Nobody wins in this situation and it can actually do more damage than good for your own site’s SEO. Make the commitment to customize your content or have custom content written by a professional. It’s worth it in the end.
For more information about blogging and custom web content packages from NextGear Marketing, contact us today.
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