Site content creation

[ChristiMcGinley]

I have a new customer that wants to build a comprehensive website to provide dental health information.  However, he's a busy dentist and can't develop all the content himself.  He particularly  likes what mercola.com (http://articles.mercola.com/sites/current.aspx or http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/vitalvotes/default.aspx) is doing to provide content from other sources.

At first I thought this could be a good thing and that we could setup some Google Alerts that would alert us to new content related to specific topic areas and then post excerpts and links to the original source of the content.

But now I'm concerned that we'll get penalized for this.

Can you give me some advice on how to go about getting new/fresh content on a new website that doesn't require someone to write it all themselves?

Thank you!

[EGOL]

I would go to that meeting with some examples....

Joe Schmoe dentist has articles about this and this and this on his site.

Ask what are his specialties?  What expertise does she want to share?  Pet peeves?

This is your dentist's opportunity to improve the dental health of every person who visits his/her website.

[ChristiMcGinley]

Wow! Thank you all for such fast and excellent responses.  I guess you've all confirmed my suspicion.  In looking again at the mercola.com website, I see that they are actually adding some unique content to each post.  I suspect they may have a staff person or copywriter doing this since none of the posts are very long.

I'll re-approach my client and see if I can explain to them a better approach and why it's better in the long run to provide good unique content themselves.

Thanks everyone!

[EGOL]

However, he's a busy dentist and can't develop all the content himself.

It is really hard to get webdesign and SEO clients to author their own content.  They don't "get it" that this can be some of the most important marketing for their business and a way to demonstrate their credibility, professionalism and unique style.

I think that it is worth getting some ideas about the benefits of authorship together and approaching the dentist a second time about this subject.

[MBayes]

It is a tough question.  We have been down this road, and found that in the end, it has to be unique content. It's really challenging to ask a client who is not a writer to write, just as it is difficult to ask a writer to be a dentist.

We use a combination system at times.  We send a q and A sheet to the client on different topics. We then have a professional writer turn it into a page or article.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Dunamis did really well in pointing out core issues, and a technique that I highly recommend to clients.  What I'll add here is that if you go the route of excerpts, and do not add unique content to those - enough that the majority of content is the unique new portion, the site will be very poorly received by visitors and search engines.

Individual articles should be at least a few hundred words of unique content.  Anything less will result in those pages either being completely ignored by the search engines, or worse, flagged as either duplicate content (you don't have to have an exact copy of another page to get the dupe content flag - even if only a good portion of the page is replicated, that's enough without that extra unique content), or even possibly not even indexed at all.

[MarieHaynes]

Tough question....I think that any solution that doesn't involve someone writing fresh content is not going to work well.  If you're using someone else's articles then it's not unique content and I would guess that it wouldn't be terribly helpful for your site.

One option would be to hire someone to write articles.  You can find copywriters in just about any niche.  Or, what may be less expensive and possibly better would be for the customer to have an employee write articles for the site.  If you wanted to be involved, one idea would be for you to scan google news occasionally - set up alerts for dental issues and then see what news stories come in.  For example, here's one in today's news:

http://music.aol.co.uk/2011/06/07/john-lydon-speech-problems-surgery/

You could have the dentist or an employee write an article that describes what could have happened there.  But, if you just provide an excerpt or a link it's not likely to help you much from an SEO perspective.

That probably doesn't help much though if you are looking for a solution that doesn't involve someone writing the material themselves!