Thursday, October 13th 2008, by Adam Barger

Like a lot of things, getting started could be the hardest part of building your website. We frequently get emails from people telling us how great our website builder is but asking for ideas of what to put on their web pages. In this article I'm going to give you 5 tips for coming up with great website content.

Tip 1: Less is more.

Don't beat yourself up about putting a ton of content on each one of your pages and don't think you have to have a lot of pages on your website. I think a lot of website can be summed up in three or four pages. The most popular pages are your home page, about, contact, and maybe products, or services. You homepage should be a summary of what your site is all about. So put a great headline across the top and communicate just the jist of your site on that page.

Tip 2: Pretend like you're talking face to face.

If you want to go into detail about your business and your website the about page is a great place to do that. If you're having trouble thinking of what to put on the about page ask yourself these questions.

Who are we?
What do we do?
How did we get started?
How are we different?

Answering those questions in place speak will give you plenty of content. Don't worry about sounding proper or being grammatically correct. Just type in the same way you would speak to someone face to face. Keep a conversation going with your site visitors.

Tip 3: Get to the point

People are busy and since they found your site on the internet chances are they're shuffling through a ton of data, skimming, looking for only the important tid bits of information. Don't talk their ear off with useless information and try to keep your paragraphs fairly short. Make your text easy to skim by bolding important keywords and phrases and make sure there is plenty of whitespace.

Tip 4: Cover the basics

If you're having a bit of writers block there are a few things you should do to your site right off that will help your brain get going. To create your site properly you really need to give each page a title, keywords, and meta description. This helps tell the search engines what your site is about. You can do this in WebStarts by clicking on Tools>SEO Wizard and completing each step.

Tip 5: Get a clue

When all else fails remember that you're not alone and there are probably other websites in your same field who have already come up with some great content. Go to your competitors sites or other sites that may be similar to yours and read them. You're sure to get some ideas for your own content in the process. Try to avoid copying from another website word for word. Search engines don't like duplicate content so copying other websites content could negatively effect your search engine rankings and your site's ability to get found on the web.