Software
that generates or modifies content for websites has become extremely popular in
recent times. What impact does this have on the overall quality of articles?
Here are some essential facts that you should consider if you reuse or rewrite
articles from your website for publication.
Everybody
knows that you need good quality content for your website. If you want the
search engines to find your website you need to have unique content. In recent
times many lazy webmasters have tried to fool engines by just scraping content
from existing sites – or random fragments of other people’s articles. Others
prefer the use of entire articles from free article directories to fill their
sites. Many times you see sites that are solely made up of articles by other
people – poorly organized – some of them partly rewritten. While this may
attract search engines there are two main problems:
1. The
duplicate content penalty – this means that the engines in most cases will detect
duplicate copies of content and devaluate most of them.
2. The user
experience. If a user comes to your site – which is what you want I suppose –
they are presented with a collection of random articles but cannot see anything
of unique value.
The first
point is obvious. Experts have indicated recently that around 60% of duplicate
content is detected by the search engine algorithms. The one that would count
for a search will be the one with the highest page rank – no matter if it has
been there first or not. This means a copy may rank well while the original
gets devalued. Search engines don’t care who wrote something first. The only thing
they care about is relevance.
The second
point is a little harder to understand for most people. A poor user experience
may result in users to never come back to your site. Some webmasters don’t even
care about their visitors. But think a moment: What is a visitor? Think of your
own home. How do you treat a visitor? If somebody comes to visit you – would
you offer reused or rotten food – or a warm beer? I am sure you won’t. So now
think of your website as some extension of your home and your personality.
People want to see, read and feel a certain personal touch when visiting your
site. If your site reads and feels like all others they’ll be gone in an
instance.
The problem
with using automated tools to artificially generate masses of content is that
you produce zombies without a soul. And people can sense that when reading.
Now this
does not mean that you cannot use smart software to assist you in producing
great content or modifying existing one. In fact all journalists use tools like
thesauruses and others. They have to produce articles all the time under
tremendous pressure with little or no time.
The crucial
thing is that you need to have something to start with, a good idea, a great
concept – a core 20% and then you may use software to assist you.
Ever tried
the synonyms feature in your word processor? (Just right-click on a word and
select synonyms). Now this is a very simple approach. You don’t make a text
unique just by replacing words. Just go a check any article you find on the web
using copyscape. They find even slightly modified content all over. You’ll soon
find that there are not many really unique articles on the web. Almost anything
has already been reused in one way or the other. Is that bad? No, as long as
you keep the user in mind who will hopefully read your article.
The best
strategy is to write your own content – because it has your unique voice in it.
Then use software tools such as Website Content Wizard to support you by
applying a phrase based thesaurus – replacing blocks of generic phrases and so
on. This is the point: software should support – not replace your creativity.
So while
software can be of great help in generating good unique content for your
website, always keep in mind the reader who will have to eat what you prepared.
Before you press any submit or upload button, always ask yourself: Would I want
to read what I just produced?
Software such as Website-Contentwizard can support authors in producing unique quality content in record time: Go to www.website-contentwizard.com to see a free video demonstration this authoring tool.
