What you write on your website is what your visitors read. That’s pretty obvious, right? It is, but too many people forget that their website is kind of like their spokesman. When you're talking about your business, you want that spokesman to show your best side, and that’s where good content writing comes in. A complete reference on good writing is far beyond the scope of this website, but here are a few tips to help bolster your website content:

• Do not make spelling errors! Always use spell check — or better yet a dictionary — to avoid those misspellings (is that spelled correctly?).
• On a related note, make sure you’re using the correct word. Common word substitution mistakes include ‘then’ instead of ‘than’, ‘vary’ instead of ‘very’ and ‘there’ instead of ‘their’.
• Watch that grammar, too. If you aren’t the best at grammar, invest in a good handbook and get familiar with it.
• Pick a tense and stick to it. People tend to write in either the past or present tense. Both are fine, but not at the same time! Use one tense throughout your website to avoid awkward sounding writing.
• Always, always proofread your work. You'll be surprised at the mistakes you made, and it's much better for you to catch them instead of your website's visitors.
• After you proofread your work, have someone else proofread it, too. It's always harder for you to spot your own mistakes, so put that second set of eyes on your content before you publish it.

Each article should say exactly what you need to say, but no more. People generally have a shorter attention span when reading web content than they do when reading printed material, like a book. Remember also that, if you write a long article, your visitors will need to keep scrolling to read it, and people don’t like doing that.

On the other hand, make sure you write enough to satisfy your visitors. People come to your website to learn about who you are and what you can do for them. Be sure you don’t disappoint them! There’s also the flip side of the scrolling issue. If your page’s content is too short, the web page may well look “empty”.

A good length for a web article is around 300 to 500 words. Just make sure that, when you write your website’s content, write just enough and not a word more.

Search engines constantly strive to better their page ranking algorithms. One way in which they figure out what a page is all about is by analyzing the words used in that page. Words that appear the most frequently are assumed to be the most relevant to the page's topic. Search engines take these words and use them to rank your page.

Search engines know that people know this, though, and they take that into consideration, too. When a search engine finds content in which some words appear with unnatural frequency, the engine assumes that the words are there simply to attract its attention. This is called “keyword spamming”, and when a search engine thinks that a site is doing it, it actually penalizes that site’s ranking.

What’s the right number of keywords? At the moment, the magic number seems to be around 7%. That means that, for every hundred words of page content, you should use all the keywords that you want the search engines to pick up seven times each. The engines get suspicious when that count reaches 12%, so be careful. Your best bet is simply writing what you need to write. Search ranking algorithms are always changing, and the current trend is rewarding natural writing styles. If you’re keeping things focused, your content should do just fine with the search engines.