We have a set of guidelines we use for our articles. We primarily use these guidelines to create the best reading experience for our users. However, there are also intentional SEO and advertising benefits as well.
Length
Articles should be short, but not too short. We ask all our contributors to shoot for 300 to 1,200 words. We’ve found greater success with multiple articles on the same topic opposed to one extremely long article.
Topic
For our readers, we try to keep our contributed topics to something that homeowners in the Durham area would find useful. Since our contributors are in professions, they should also be related to their expertise. For example, our lighting expert Dominic should not be writing articles on plumbing.
Websites gain more SEO traction if they narrowly tailored to one topic. Unfortunately, our topic is very broad, so we have to keep the subtopics pretty narrow.
Links
Links are good and bad. Because search engines give more value to reliable sources, our link strategy mirrors what a good researcher would use. We try to avoid unreliable sources as much as possible.
Internally, it helps to link to other pertinent articles in order to give readers a good grasp of related useful content.
Readability
To us, readability is the most important criteria. Readers don’t stay if an article is hard to read. Therefore, we edit every blog for readability. Hopefully it helps!
Pictures
We love relevant pictures. A good picture can draw in a reader. On the other hand, a bad picture can mislead. We also ensure we only use permitted photos. All of our photos are creative commons or taken by Richard or Stuart. This ensures compliance with the law. Photographers are professionals too.
Finally, these are guidelines for our articles. When it makes sense, we break the rules. The most important thing is that our articles add value.
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