Website Tip: How to Find More Content to Write

An old web design adage is, “Content is king.” All the SEO and fancy design in the world won’t help you if you don’t have any content.

So how do you keep on writing? Where do all the new ideas come from?

Everybody’s got their own tricks, but here’s one that I love to use when I’m short on ideas. Go through your search engine logs and see what people are searching for - and not finding.

Here’s an example. Last week I wrote an article on How to Create Style-able CSS Tooltips.

As usual, I was browsing through the Google Analytics data a day or two later. While looking through the Search Engine results (the queries that people used to come to my site), I noticed that someone used the query “gradient background image gimp.”

The odd thing about this was that the article wasn’t about creating background images in Gimp - I just happened to mention at the end that you could use Gimp to create a gradient background image and add it to your tooltip.

This tells me two things.

First, someone is looking for this information. If I write it… they will come.

Second, someone else is not serving this information up. If a user stumbles on one of my articles that just barely mentions the topic, there can’t be a lot of targeted articles out there.

I decided to take the topic and run with it. A few days later, I wrote a simple tutorial about how to create a gradient background image in Gimp. I targeted the article at those major keywords - gradient, background, image, Gimp - and now it’s getting some nice search engine traffic.

So if you’re ever short on ideas, this is a great way to respark that creativity. Look through your search engine logs for queries that bring people in - but don’t bring people to what they’re looking for. Then… give them what they want.

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