Often when people are confronted with the task of developing content for their website they are perplexed and filled with indecision as how to start. Following some these basic guidelines, will not only help you to produce quality content that is relevant, but will help you rank well in Google as well.

Start by brainstorming ideas for your site's content. Ask yourself some basic questions such as: Who is your audience? Who is going to be using the site? Are they computer savvy? Are they looking for information? Reviews on a product? Or are they looking for a service? Consider the age, sex, socioeconomic status, geographic location, relevant interests or hobbies of your viewer important to consider? These questions will help set the tone of your content and give you direction to begin writing.

Sometimes the answers are very straightforward based upon the products or services you offer. Provide useful and succinct content for exactly what a visitor will need to know when visiting your site, or might want to know before making a purchase. Some reasons for coming to your site might include: product specifications, product features, product reviews, shipping or ordering information, pricing and availability of products.

The content of your website communicate exactly what your website is about to your visitors and is the primary source of information that search engine bots use in determining how to index your website. The most recent algorithm update from Google is the most recent attempt to remove "webspam" or, the junk results you might get in search results when websites try to cheat their way into higher positions. Websites that once enjoyed high rankings due to scraped and duplicate content are now experiencing a huge drop in rankings. This new algorithm update to the "new Google" means now more than ever, well written, original textual content is mandatory for all onsite and offsite web content at the risk of incurring ranking penalties from Google. The new Google standard dictates quality over quantity.

Conduct keyword research for your business, service or product that you are building the site for. Use tools such as Google's Keyword Tool to generate keyword for targeted content. Choose approximately 3-5 terms per page. The best approach is to develop well written, relevant content for your website that is not bloated with keywords or comes across as being "spammy". It must be 100% original. If you do need to quote other sites be sure to use proper html tags and syntax to mark the text as a citation or a reference. You should have a minimum of 500 words of content on your homepage. Be sure to include several instances and iterations of the keywords you will be targeting.

An often overlooked area of content writing is writing content for the landing pages of your site. Landing pages are the entry pages that your target audience land on when visiting your site. What page they land on depends mainly on your SEO optimization strategy and link building techniques. Work closely with an SEO specialist to determine what your link building strategy will be and what internal pages to target. For example, If you sell "widgets" you might target your homepage for a generic phrase such as "industrial widgets". You might then have an internal page ranking for "red widgets" and another for "blue widgets". Both would be optimized for those related search terms.

You should have approximately 400-600 words of textual content per landing page. It is important not to neglect content on these pages. Internal pages tend to create conversions much more readily than someone landing on a homepage. The homepage is typically more general in nature and usual provides an overview of what you have to offer. Your internal pages are where you have your products or services.

People coming to the homepage are typically looking for information or "just browsing". Those coming in to an internal page have already done their research and are more likely to be prepared to purchase. An analog would be a person going to a store and "just browsing", as opposed to someone going directly to the department they want with a specific product in mind.

Do not neglect your internal product pages either. The same rules of good content creation apply to these pages as well. Create unique, keyword focused content that will be useful when a person is conducting a web search for similar products or services.

The content on your site is not "final" once it is live on your web server. You can edit it freely and continue to revise and further optimize the content throughout your entire site. Google bots will visit your site more frequently if you do so. Remember to create your site content for your visitors. Providing well written copy will help to spread your business's message products and services and will lead to more conversions of visitors in to customers.