The Dollar Factory

Top 5 content related errors that should be avoided at all costs

People come to your web site to find interesting content. They don’t care about duplicate content that they can easily find somewhere else. It is no secret that when it comes to online success, [b]fresh and unique content is king.[/b] However, even if your site is choke full of such great content, you still need to present it in a way that makes it easily understood. In this article, I will list 5 common content errors that can easily be avoided and always should.

1. Uninformative landing page: Your landing page is the first page a visitor will see. It should be easy for anyone to determine the site’s purpose in a quick scan of the page. A well designed landing page allows visitors to effortlessly determine whether the site has something of interest to them. Even if they don’t have time to explore the site further during their initial visit, they might decide to bookmark it for later. A properly designed landing page can create a large number of return visitors. First impressions count, so don’t waste them.
2. Unhelpful/poor descriptions of products and services offered: It is common for a web site to offer for sale several different services and/or products. In that case, it is essential that each service/product is displayed along with a brief description and perhaps a picture that makes it easy for customers to determine whether they want any or not. In fact, the same rules apply to descriptions of different sections of the site itself.
3. Conflicting content: It might happen that you provide information about the same product or service in different sections of the site. If this is the case, then it is essential that the descriptions are consistent. To make a sale, it is important that you convince your customer that you are an expert on what you are trying to sell. If you provide conflicting information about a product/service then you are hurting your credibility more than anything. If you provide contradictory content, then forget about making a lucrative sale and forget about a customer returning any time soon or recommending your service/product to a friend.
4. Outdated content: The online world is changing continuously and you have to make sure that your site is up to date or you will be left behind in the dust. Personal web sites on Geocities are the place for outdated content. If your goal is to profit online then you better stay on the cutting edge or else kiss those sales goodbye. Keeping content up to date requires a fair amount of work so make sure that you can commit enough time to produce fresh content every week and even every day if you are writing a Blog.
5. Missing and unfinished content: It is a terrible user experience when you want to navigate to a particular section of a site that is of interest only to be confronted with a nasty “page not found” type error. Maintain you site at all costs. Make sure that if you remove some content you also remove all links to it from other parts of the site. Furthermore, the “under construction” animated GIF is from the 90s and it died along with the dotcom bubble. Do not publish a web site or any section that is not 100% complete. Nobody on the Internet cares to see a half finished, unhelpful site. Your credibility will drop to regions never before seen, lost along with the millions of dollars invested on dotcoms in the 90s!