SEO
Content Writing Tips for beginners
Often, we make silly mistakes when writing content for the first time. It does not matter whether you are writing for a website or any other platforms, your content should be easy to read and grammatically correct.
When we start writing about any topic (especially for SEO), we think about creating rich content. We also try to include various keywords along with complex sentences to make a great impression. This may be useful but if you are a fresher or beginner, you should first focus on the basic content.
In this article, we will not talk about having excellent professional writing skills. We will tell you about simple but essential content writing tips. Even if you stuck at writing your first article, you will find these tips helpful.
6 Essential Content Writing Tips for beginners
Start with simple and easy paragraphs
It is good to start with a brief about your topic. If you are providing a solution to any problem, first tell about the problem. If your topic has a specific audience, mention this. If you are preparing some tutorials, start with a scenario where it will be used.
Keep your sentences short
Short sentences are easy to read. We recommend keeping the sentence length between 12 to 20 words most of the time. Try to break a line into two if it is getting long. If a user finds it hard to read or understand, he will leave your site or article in a few seconds.
Similarly, a paragraph should not contain too long or too short content. We recommend you to keep 80 to 150 words in a paragraph. This may include 3 to 6 sentences.
Remember: According to different studies & research, recommended content length vary with the topic and audience. The given recommendation is just a basic idea to get it started. You will find the optimum length for your content with some practice and by taking user feedback from time to time.
Correct Spelling and Grammatical Mistakes
If you have just started writing content, there are chances that there will be spelling & grammatical mistakes. To correct these mistakes, you do not need to be a communication expert. There are various online tools available to check your grammar and spelling mistakes. You can simply paste your content to docs.google.com and it will highlight mistakes by underline. The other two recommended tools are www.grammarly.com and www.paperrater.com
Write Unique Content
Today, there are thousands of websites and millions of articles available for each topic. It is easy to create content by copying and combining content from different websites. However, it will not be helpful for users as well as Search engines (like Google).
It is essential to avoid duplicate or copied content if you want to succeed in the long term. You can write unique and original content only if you have good knowledge about the topic. If you are not a master in any area, there is still a lot of scope in writing if you can help users in any way. See the next point for more details.
Write Useful Content
If you do not have much knowledge but can still create useful (and somewhat unique) content. For that, you need to read more and more about the topic. When you read about some topic from different sources, you get more understanding about it. And if your way of writing is good, you can write about it better than original sources. That is another way of creating better and original content.
Sometimes, there is not enough content is available or content is not well structured. If you can collect content from different sources, structure it and present it well, readers will definitely like it. Ultimately, a reader or user is always searching for useful and better content. If you can provide it, you will definitely get success in writing.
Optimise your Content
Mostly expert recommends that first, you should write content for users and then think about search engines. However, you should always optimize your content for SEO. Think of yourself as a user. What different keywords you would like to use while searching for specific content. Finalize some keywords or one focus keyword Search Engines and optimize your content according to them.
You can learn more in SEO Tutorials
5 Silly Content Writing mistakes you should avoid
If a user finds inconsistencies in your content, he will not even read it. This may be related to capitalization of your content, spacing and full stop. When you start writing content for the first time or If you have poor writing skills, you make these stupid mistakes. Therefore, it is important to take care of these simple things before creating quality content.
Here are some sentences and their mistakes.
Having inconsistent space between words
Bad: He sat under a tree.
Good: He sat under a tree.
You can see that the first sentence has an extra space between words. There should be a single space.
Incorrect punctuation in content
Bad: I am Robin What is your name.
Good: I am Robin. What is your name?
The first sentence does not have a proper full stop and a question mark. Always write complete sentences with correct punctuation. Sentences should begin with a capital letter and end in either a full stop, exclamation or question mark.
Spacing between lines
Bad: He sat under a tree .There is someone at the door .
Good: He sat under a tree. There is someone at the door.
Make sure that You have a single space after a full stop (not before full stop).
Capitalisation of words
Bad: SEO Stands For Search engine Optimization. Quality content is one of the Important factors for seo.
Good: SEO stands For Search Engine Optimization. Quality content is one of the important factors for SEO.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and it is also an important word here. Therefore, only the first letter and important keywords (if any) should be capitalized. All other words should be written in lower case.
Consecutive Sentences starting with same word
Bad: HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is used to design web pages. HTML is easy to learn.
Good: HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. By using HTML, you can design web pages. it is easy to learn.
In the first paragraph, all sentences start with ‘HTML’ word. Therefore, try using different words as given above.
These are some of the easy things that you need to check before publishing your content. Once you get the basic things right, you can move towards creating rich and quality content. There are many online tools that can further help you to check the quality of your content.