How to create rules for adding content to your website

Website content is all the information present on its pages: text, photos, video, audio and other formats. Filling a website with content requires a separate team or at least an individual specialist - the content manager. He creates, edits and adds all materials to the website. The main goal of the work is to fill the site with content.

It is important that it will be high-quality, diverse and unique, providing high positions in search engines and active visiting of the resource by the target audience.

Competent work of this specialist affects the success of the project promotion. In case of errors in adding content, sanctions from the search engines are possible: reducing the resource position in the results, selectively or completely excluding the pages of the website from the search results.

To determine how to write content for the website, a regulation is created which describes all the important points that need to draw attention. In addition to the editorial rules or style rules (stylebook), such a document may also contain a list of sources – information, where to get content for the website.

The regularity of creating materials should also be specified, since the frequency of updating the site affects the ranking in search engines.

When you are adding texts, it is important to check their uniqueness using online anti-plagiarism services. Google considers auto generation to unacceptable ways of creating texts, so it is recommended to exclude this method of working with content. Articles should be clear, logical, with meaning and benefit to the reader.

Using of non-unique texts from other websites leads to sanctions: Panda filters from Google. To avoid such problems, you must follow the recommendations of Google to create high-quality sites with unique materials that are of interest to users.

In addition to the sanctions of search engines, using other materials violates copyright law and may cause legal proceedings with the copyright holder.

Text optimization is necessary for successful promotion of your resource in accordance with the assembled semantic core. However, it is necessary to use key phrases moderately in order to avoid reoptimization and the possibility of imposing sanctions from the search engines.

Content of the website should not contain orthography, punctuation and stylistic errors. The text should be easy to read and understand, you need to avoid newspaper stamps and excessive "vapidity".

You must adhere to the rules established for the resource when placing the text content:

• use for all pages the same sets of typefaces, a certain selection of important text and color accents;
• adjust the length of the string, which should facilitate readability and not be too long;
• establish common values of intersymbol and line spacing to improve the visual perception of the material;
• apply the specified font sizes , for example, the headings need a larger size, and so on.

When creating content, you need to determine the preferred length of the text, depending on the subject. Also , you need to check the length of sentences. Studies show that the length of a sentence affects the perception of information. It is not recommended to use sentences longer than 25 words. With a sentence length of 14 words, the reader understands 90% of the information, using of 43 words reduces the level of understanding to 10%.

An analysis of more than a million articles showed , that the length of 85% of materials posted on the Internet is less than a thousand words. However, when using longer content, users are more likely to share it on social networks, and it is more linked to other websites.

You can get text length recommendations using the Serpstat "Clustering and Text Analytics" tool. First , you must create or import a semantic core and cluster it using this module.

After that, it is possible to select the cluster analysis and click "Start text analytics":

As a result, we will receive recommendations on the use of keywords in the meta tags and the "body" of the page, as well as the approximate length of the text. The algorithm is based on the analysis of competitors in the TOP-15, as a result of which the minimum, optimal and maximum number of words for the search text is displayed.

Well-structured text is perceived better than the information presented in a single block. The following structure recommendations are available:

• in order to familiarize the reader with the topic of the article, at the beginning of the article set out brief introductory information and adding content;
• the material should contain informative headers h1-h6. Each page uses only one h1 header. The remaining subheadings are added in compliance with the correct ordinal nesting;
• the texts within subsections are divided into small paragraphs;
• both readers and search engines are well aware of lists and tables.

To facilitate the perception and attract the attention of users, you need to use pictures and photos in text materials. Graphic content is analyzed by search engines and must be unique. Thanks to the unique graphic content, you can increase search traffic with the help of visitors who find a website from a search by pictures.

Non-unique images can be made unique by processing in a graphic s editor: for example, cropping, transformation, splicing of several images. You can check the uniqueness of images using the services: use the search in Google Images. You can find a link to the original of this image by adding the desired image:

You can use the following graphic content options on your website:

• photo;
• pictures;
• gifs;
• screenshots;
• infographics;
• slide show;
• flowcharts.

If you haven't created any graphic content yet, pay attention to the list of tools to create infographics.

Fill two attributes in the picture:

• title - a brief hint for users about the posted picture. Occurs when you hover over an image;
• alt - an alternative text that is indexed by search engines and is used to determine the content of the image. It is shown on the website instead of a picture , if the user turns off the display of images in the browser, or when the page loads slowly.

We recommend using concise descriptions, the attribute length should be up to 100-150 characters, one key phrase can be used, however transactional words such as "buy", "price", etc., are undesirable.

Search engines can't yet to determine the uniqueness of audio and video, but this content increases the spend time by users on the site, improving behavioral factors.

Marketing research on video content, conducted in 2018, found:

• 78% of Internet users watch videos every week, and 55% daily;
• 58% of respondents say they prefer watching videos to reading text;
• 55% of people retain attention when watching videos - this is the highest figure among all types of content.

Statista research shows that audio content is becoming an important channel for interaction with the audience: 45% of Internet users around the world between the ages of 25-34 listen to podcasts.

The following types of video and audio content can be added on your website:

• audio and video instructions;
• interview records;
• lectures;
• webinars;
• presentations;
• animated films;
• virtual tours and more.

The quality and promotion of the resource depends on the competent actions of the content manager. In this work, this specialist needs to pay attention to the following points:

• uniqueness of materials;
• usefulness and clarity of the content for users;
• literacy and a given style of texts;
• design that promotes readability and perception of textual information;
• adding optimized graphics;
• using high-quality audio and video materials to attract a wide audience.