Site content creation
-
I have a new customer that wants to build a comprehensive website to provide dental health information. However, he's a busy dentist and can't develop all the content himself. He particularly likes what mercola.com (http://articles.mercola.com/sites/current.aspx or http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/vitalvotes/default.aspx) is doing to provide content from other sources.
At first I thought this could be a good thing and that we could setup some Google Alerts that would alert us to new content related to specific topic areas and then post excerpts and links to the original source of the content.
But now I'm concerned that we'll get penalized for this.
Can you give me some advice on how to go about getting new/fresh content on a new website that doesn't require someone to write it all themselves?
Thank you!
-
I would go to that meeting with some examples....
Joe Schmoe dentist has articles about this and this and this on his site.
Ask what are his specialties? What expertise does she want to share? Pet peeves?
This is your dentist's opportunity to improve the dental health of every person who visits his/her website.
-
Wow! Thank you all for such fast and excellent responses. I guess you've all confirmed my suspicion. In looking again at the mercola.com website, I see that they are actually adding some unique content to each post. I suspect they may have a staff person or copywriter doing this since none of the posts are very long.
I'll re-approach my client and see if I can explain to them a better approach and why it's better in the long run to provide good unique content themselves.
Thanks everyone!
-
However, he's a busy dentist and can't develop all the content himself.
It is really hard to get webdesign and SEO clients to author their own content. They don't "get it" that this can be some of the most important marketing for their business and a way to demonstrate their credibility, professionalism and unique style.
I think that it is worth getting some ideas about the benefits of authorship together and approaching the dentist a second time about this subject.
-
It is a tough question. We have been down this road, and found that in the end, it has to be unique content. It's really challenging to ask a client who is not a writer to write, just as it is difficult to ask a writer to be a dentist.
We use a combination system at times. We send a q and A sheet to the client on different topics. We then have a professional writer turn it into a page or article.
-
Dunamis did really well in pointing out core issues, and a technique that I highly recommend to clients. What I'll add here is that if you go the route of excerpts, and do not add unique content to those - enough that the majority of content is the unique new portion, the site will be very poorly received by visitors and search engines.
Individual articles should be at least a few hundred words of unique content. Anything less will result in those pages either being completely ignored by the search engines, or worse, flagged as either duplicate content (you don't have to have an exact copy of another page to get the dupe content flag - even if only a good portion of the page is replicated, that's enough without that extra unique content), or even possibly not even indexed at all.
-
Tough question....I think that any solution that doesn't involve someone writing fresh content is not going to work well. If you're using someone else's articles then it's not unique content and I would guess that it wouldn't be terribly helpful for your site.
One option would be to hire someone to write articles. You can find copywriters in just about any niche. Or, what may be less expensive and possibly better would be for the customer to have an employee write articles for the site. If you wanted to be involved, one idea would be for you to scan google news occasionally - set up alerts for dental issues and then see what news stories come in. For example, here's one in today's news:
http://music.aol.co.uk/2011/06/07/john-lydon-speech-problems-surgery/
You could have the dentist or an employee write an article that describes what could have happened there. But, if you just provide an excerpt or a link it's not likely to help you much from an SEO perspective.
That probably doesn't help much though if you are looking for a solution that doesn't involve someone writing the material themselves!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to handle pre-existing backlinks on new site.
Hi - We built a new site on a URL that had previously been used. We are noticing a lot of spammy backlinks pointing to our current site and ending up on a 404 page. Any recommendations on how to handle this?
Link Building | | JJKM551 -
If your website is mentioned on an external site does it matter the amount of people who click on the link to your site to improve your domain authority
I want to know about link building strategy and does it matter the amount of times someone clicks on link on to your site from the external site to affect your domain authority
Link Building | | SimplifyValetStorage0 -
Building my Portfolio of 70 MicroNiche Sites (10-15 Pages of Content)
Hello Moz Community, I just bought 70 new domains in the past month in different niches with exact match domains, installing these sites on 2 different hostgator servers, installing all the plugins needed etc. and start publishing first 10 articles on each site. ( the keyword research was done with long tail pro and choosing the best long tails with MOZ difficulty grader that is under 40-45.) My question is the following: If I will have some of these sites that will don’t rank in Google in the next 3-6 months for the main keyword without building links…what will be the best course/method/resources I need to know about building quality backlinks and having the time to do these tasks on each website to be sure that every site will be a winner, or even 50-70% of them in both traffic & money ROI !?! I want to have a minimum of 10 sites that will make around 150$ per month because my Intention is to sell these sites on flippa for higher multiples of 15-20 monthly revenue. ( I sold my first website on flippa in September for 1650$ and is awesome. I want to repeat this success at a higher level ) Thank you ! I built niche sites since February 2012 but in terms of building backlinks to microniche sites I didn’t do too many things in the past when is about backlinking (just submitting in directories) so I ask about the experience of this community. Which are the best methods to build links in 2013 J Best regards, Sebastian Papp & His Team
Link Building | | Sebastyan220 -
Content - Onsite Blog vs Article Submission
Hey Folks, First post! I have a 4 year old site with reasonable authority (49) and lots of content. Easy first question. I plan to create lots more unique, useful and relevant content however I'm in a quandary as to whether to: A. Post the content on our sites blog or B. Submit the article to an article directory like ezine-articlesand backlink to my site. Is one better than the other? Thanks, Richard
Link Building | | Rich-O0 -
Interesting link to a competitors site
I recently found a very interesting link to two of my competitors sites. The companies are number 2 and 3 in Google for my targeted keywords (for some reason Wikipedia is number 1) and are both linked from the home page of this site. I don't want to leave a link for linkers site because I don't want them to be able to see that I'm snooping on them but, here is the scenerio: The site that they are linked from is a .org site. It is basically our targeted keywords in a .org. Something like bluewidgets.org. At the very bottom of the home page are some tabs, you click the first tab and it opens about 20 new tabs, when you click any of those 20 tabs it displays some text at the bottom of the page. This text is of no value to visitors, it is obvious to me what is happening here. Both companies are linked with targeted keywords in the anchor and title text. I'm wondering if I should also pursue a link from this page. I know there is value in a .org link but this site seems to be built to link to those two sites. Anybody else ever run into anything like I'm describing. Should I post a link to this site?
Link Building | | TRICORSystems0 -
Does it hurt your site to syndicate content on other sites?
Does publishing an article from your site on other sites hurt your site if you require a link back to your site? If website B, C, and D publish an article found site A, but they link back to site A, does that hurt or help site A?
Link Building | | nicole.healthline0 -
Link building and directory links to a new site
I have three new sites all hosted on the same server in the same public html folder and each site is in a different folder inside the public html folder. These sites are a listing of live music venues in different cities in Texas. Should I link these sites together to increase page rank to each other and also put key search phrases in the anchor text and place these links in the text in the center of each page of each site to make the links more effective? Also, because the sites are about a year old they don't have many inlinks yet. If i submit them to about 50 directories will Google not like this because there are way more directory links than natural links? I've been told that it is trouble to have more than about 50% directory links compared to natural links. Thanks in advance for your answers! Take care,
Link Building | | Ron10
Ron0 -
What are the best Content Syndication services?
Hi, I'm still trying to find the best methods to drive more traffic to my site ( geotherm.co.hu). Now I'm experimenting with Content Syndication, but yet I don't have any experience. Which are the best services? Are three sites that I should avoid?
Link Building | | joo0