Are You Sure Your Home Business Website Content Is Original?
Author: Craig Ritsema
One of the challenges facing many new online business owners is what to put on their new website's home page. Many people will hire a professional to do this for them, but many others want to start their business without investing too much money and will take this task on themselves.
Most of these people are not copywriters by trade and may find this initial work somewhat intimidating. Also, some may have learned enough to realize that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of their pages is important but yet do not understand enough to know if they are doing it right.
One easy trap to fall into under these conditions is to copy someone else's website text content. Now we all know (or should know) that copying the entire webpage or parts from someone else's website is wrong. But what about copying phrases or paragraphs from the new affiliate program you just signed up with and using them in different places on your home page? You are selling their product after all.
Most company affiliate programs have probably already supplied you with text copy for their products to use in links, etc. Nothing wrong with this - use it to sell their products.
The problem comes when you read thru their sales pages and find a paragraph that reads really well, sells, and would look good on your site... Better yet, copy a paragraph from one affiliate program's site, a different paragraph from another and before long you have your site's home page completed with professional sounding copy.
The question then becomes: Do all of these copied phrases and paragraphs pieced together for my homepage become original work? Or better yet the question should be: Did I really improve my site's home page by copying these "fragments" from other professional written sites?
Most online business owners are aware that the search engines like original content best. On the surface this new combination of "fragments" created for your home page would seem to be ok.
However, I would suggest that the originality of the website content be considered based on the breakdown of the homepage content rather than the page as a whole. In other words, give value to the phrases, sentences and paragraphs which all together form the copy for your home page.
A simple illustration and test of this would be to use a service such as "CopyScape" which checks the internet for websites which appear to be a copy of your website. It does this by checking for phrases and sentences which match the same on your website.
When I last visited they offered a "demo mode" where you could look for up to 10 copies of your website for free without signing up for their service. If you have any content on your website that you copied from your affiliate's program you may be in for a surprise. What you will find is a lot of your affiliate "peers" selling the same products and opportunities who did what you did. They copied these same "catchy sales content" fragments and sprinkled it in various places on their web page.
I do not understand how a service like this can match these phrases and paragraphs from your homepage with those from other websites on the internet, but they do. One must assume that if they can do this so can the major search engines.
I also do not know how much the search engines "reward" original content versus "penalizing" for duplicate content. Also, what is considered duplicate content? Is it the whole page? Or is it one duplicate paragraph? Maybe it is five duplicate phrases or sentences? (I'm speaking here of the website's homepage and not content pages such as published articles, etc. that are published according to the author's terms.)
What I do know is that the search engines like original content best. Knowing this, we should work to make sure that our all important home page text is original. If we have permission to use copy from our affiliate program's materials then be careful how much you use and/or rewrite it slightly in your own words so that it is not an exact match.
Online home businesses are facing more and more competition from many people entering this exciting field. Many times that "unique edge" is all we need to stand out from the rest. So be careful with what you consider to be original content on your homepage! You may think you're getting away with something that is in reality hurting your site's visibility through the search engines.
You are free to copy this article to your site as long as you include the following resource information with an active link to my site:
Craig Ritsema operates a successful part time home business and resides in Michigan, USA. For more details visit his site at: http://www.part-time-work-at-home-opportunities.com