Content is King

[virtualtraveller]

Where to find content writers:

http://www.elance.com/c/cats/main/ca...180&type=buyer

is the content section of this small business services provider.

Personally I use this crowd:

www.virtualtravelguides.com

because I'm in travel sites. They have solved my problem of cheap content by being based in Thailand. Thus I get experienced asian-based travel writers (Native English speakers) producing quality stuff at a fraction of the price they would ask in N. America or Europe. They also provide me with data for building links.

Here are my thoughts on content...

Since the introduction of the internet I've always maintained that content is a key element of a site, and often overlooked by smaller players, assuming that a designer can produce a site and they can write the text themselves.

Obviously with SEO placing emphasis on content rich sites this has opened up a whole new industry of content generation. there are a number of options:

1. Write limited specialised content yourself and have an editor clean it up.

2. Employ a copywriter (freelancer) to write a series of pages based on a brief you give him, ensure they are familiar with online styles (pages should ideally be 300 words for SEO, even if a big topic has to be broken up), with a series of 50 word paragraphs for easy on the eye presentation.

3. Generate mass content, literally thousands of pages to catch every keyword combination (e.g. cheap flights + [thousands of cities around the world]), which an efficient copywriting company can turnover like a production line to keep costs low.

4. Plug a forum onto your site, this lets others do the work for you and brings in lots of topical stuff (loaded with keywords), but requires a moderator.

5. Blog (the fashionable thing to do), which is trendy but its popularity may fade and apart from tickling your own ego or getting your thoughts and observations down for posterity, it takes up your time and requires a dedicated habit of updating it.

6. Buy in content, or subscribe to use someone elses syndicated content, which is the way to go if you want to share and do things on the cheap. Google doesn't like duplicated content so it's likely to incur you a penalty, but otherwise it's a good idea if you merely want to provide your visitors with useful content.

7. Steal other people's content (simply cut and paste) which it the wrong thing to do, it's not difficult to run a program which scans the net looking for content duplicating your own. It causes all sorts of problems in the long run.

8. Link to other people's content: which is fine if you cannot afford to produce your own and simply want to provide a service to others: There shouldn't be any objection if you publish the standfirst (or write your own) of some one elses article and link to it. Of course, remember to make it open a fresh window so the visitor doesn't entirely abandon your site. If you intend to divert visitors to another site regularly, it's polite to check it out first with the webmaster/editor of that site, who knows you may be giving them sufficient traffic to incur some return favours.