myContentWebsite.com

Matt Bailey has a great article out called “Make Your Website Content Explode.” He brings up some great points on your content needing to be exciting and interesting.

Matt gives two examples of companies that changed their website to better engage readers and customers:

The first is John Deere. Obviously, someone in the market for a tractor wants to know exactly what the tractor is capable of before making a purchase. The John Deere site went from having a boring description of tractors to telling exactly what it does; how many attachments and how much it can lift, and so on. Their headline on the old site started off with, “Underneath their familiar green and yellow exterior isn’t just a redesign of the compact tractor, but a transformation”. This isn’t very exciting to read. The new headline is simple and to the point, “Get More Done.” Which one would stand out to you if you were viewing that site?

The other company is petsafe.net. Matt explains how their site used to be generic and didn’t really draw in visitors. Once again, the first thing you see on old the site is a generic headline, “Deluxe Little Dog Bark Control”. The new site reads, “Safe pets. Happy Owners.” As a pet owner, this new site has more appeal to me. It has an inviting message. This one is also simple and to the point.

It doesn’t take much to take your content to the next level. A few simple changes and you will be on your way to a better site.

Check out Matt’s article where he goes into a more detailed description of these sites and to get some ideas on how to improve your content!

A lot of people have been updating to Wordpress or updating their current Wordpress site lately. Thomas McMahon recently published the article, “How To Upgrade Wordpress”. He gives some great tips as well as instructions that I thought I would share with you.

It seems to be a pretty simple process, there are just some precautions to take. Here are just a few of the steps Thomas mentions in his article:

· Backup your blog’s database.

· Backup your blog’s files.

· Update any plugins.

Once you read through all of the steps, you will see they are all pretty easy things but very important to remember.

To read the rest of Thomas’ post on upgrading to Wordpress, click here.

Also, here are a couple more links about upgrading Wordpress:

Should You Upgrade To Wordpress 2.5?

Blogging Simplified With Wordpress 2.5

Good luck upgrading your site!

Lately, I’ve been seeing articles on how to get more comments on your blog. So I decided to put a few together that I think are the most important.

· Invite users to comment. - At the end of your post, you might want to say, “What do you think?” or “Do you agree?” Encourage readers to comment and make sure to have a link right under your post.

Also don’t make it difficult for readers. If they have to login just to comment they probably aren’t going to spend the time to do so.

·Interact with the comments you do have. – You want to show the readers that you are paying attention to their comments. Thank them for commenting, and reply back to the comments they leave.

· Post regularly. – Obviously, to get more comments you need more readers. People aren’t going to keep coming back to your blog if you don’t post that often.

· You should also moderate comments. – Delete any spammy or off-topic comments. It might make the number of comments go up but people probably aren’t going to continue commenting after the other comments have went slightly off track.

· Leave your post somewhat open-ended. You don’t want to cover everything or answer all questions because then your readers will have nothing to comment on. Give your readers a chance to add something to the conversation.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas to get more comments on your blog. Do you have any to add?

Some people say that anyone can write content. While that may be true, it’s the quality of your content that is important. Aaron Wall recently published a great article on this subject called, Do You Have Remarkable Featured Content? A few of the things he points out are:

• consider the competition for mindshare
• popularity of the subject
• targeting one idea at a time
• offering content of various levels of depth and quality

To gain any lead-way above your competition, you need to have fresh, unique content. You want your ‘featured’ content, the stuff you want to be known for, at least as good, and if at all possible, better than any other content on that subject. To help you achieve this for your site or blog, I’ve put together a list of articles on content for you to check out:

Fresh Content Pays Off with Search and Visitors
How to become successful Content Writer
Why Republishing Your Content Can Be Useful
Article Writing Guidelines - Creating Quality Content
Content Optimization
Great article about what you publish on your blog

WebProNews is running a series of weekly SEO Tips that I recommend checking out. They should be up every Thursday. Topics will include:

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competition Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

The first one from Dave Davies of Beanstalk is currently up here with the next one on competition analysis from Stepforth CEO Ross Dunn due Thursday.  Articles in the series will be able to be found in the Expert Articles section on the WebProNews front page.