Good quality online content provides many benefits, not least to your visitors.
However, ensuring that your website's copy is unique is just as beneficial, particularly when it comes to search engine optimisation.
Most websites contain thousands of words spread across dozens of pages.
Within reason, the more words you have on each page, the better your chances of gaining a significantly improved ranking within the search engines.
With such a demand placed on content, the temptation to cut corners can occur.
Perhaps you have a few products that are similar and so you use the same description for each.
Maybe you saw some excellent copy and just helped yourself.
Either way, the likelihood is that it will do very little to help your credibility with your visitors or the search engines.
Plagiarism is particularly frowned upon online.
Webmasters won't thank you for borrowing their copy and the search engines won't look too kindly on it either.
As their crawlers go out and look for new pages, they index each one individually.
This then gives them a log of every single page that they have ever been through, therefore allowing them to pinpoint any portions of content they have come across previously.
Algorithms are programmed to sift out the best quality and most relevant content to rank on the search engine result pages.
When they find duplicated content, they are more inclined to punish it or at least not give the page the same amount of attention as those with a high standard of original, optimised copy.
For this reason, it is imperative that you ensure that nobody else is borrowing your copy, or that you yourself aren't plagiarising your own pages.
The whole reason of doing SEO is to get your pages indexed regularly and to achieve better rankings as a result.
If all you are doing is highlighting your own duplicate content, you will probably end up doing more harm than good.
Leaving the SEO aspect to one side for a moment, you have to also consider the needs of the visitor.
If they have been to another site or a page within your website, and have read what has been written, they aren't likely to be too impressed.
Content is your option to communicate with the visitor, sell your business and everything else within it.
To cut corners is to lose a big opportunity to add your personality to on page copy and tell your visitors exactly what they need to be hearing.
Duplicate content provides a lose-lose situation for any website.
It will undermine your SEO efforts and gives the visitor another reason not to trust what you have to say.
Marketing yourself online is all about building trust and confidence in a limited amount of time; to ruin that with what is essentially the simplest of tasks, writing some copy, you will have lost a massive opportunity and will do little to convince your visitors that they are on a site to be trusted.
If you are concentrating on SEO, then content is one of the strongest weapons in your armoury.
Good quality, optimised copy will help to back up your link building and other activities.
Don't succumb to the temptation of shoehorning previously used text; start with a blank page, fresh ideas and watch as your website enjoys the benefits.
However, ensuring that your website's copy is unique is just as beneficial, particularly when it comes to search engine optimisation.
Most websites contain thousands of words spread across dozens of pages.
Within reason, the more words you have on each page, the better your chances of gaining a significantly improved ranking within the search engines.
With such a demand placed on content, the temptation to cut corners can occur.
Perhaps you have a few products that are similar and so you use the same description for each.
Maybe you saw some excellent copy and just helped yourself.
Either way, the likelihood is that it will do very little to help your credibility with your visitors or the search engines.
Plagiarism is particularly frowned upon online.
Webmasters won't thank you for borrowing their copy and the search engines won't look too kindly on it either.
As their crawlers go out and look for new pages, they index each one individually.
This then gives them a log of every single page that they have ever been through, therefore allowing them to pinpoint any portions of content they have come across previously.
Algorithms are programmed to sift out the best quality and most relevant content to rank on the search engine result pages.
When they find duplicated content, they are more inclined to punish it or at least not give the page the same amount of attention as those with a high standard of original, optimised copy.
For this reason, it is imperative that you ensure that nobody else is borrowing your copy, or that you yourself aren't plagiarising your own pages.
The whole reason of doing SEO is to get your pages indexed regularly and to achieve better rankings as a result.
If all you are doing is highlighting your own duplicate content, you will probably end up doing more harm than good.
Leaving the SEO aspect to one side for a moment, you have to also consider the needs of the visitor.
If they have been to another site or a page within your website, and have read what has been written, they aren't likely to be too impressed.
Content is your option to communicate with the visitor, sell your business and everything else within it.
To cut corners is to lose a big opportunity to add your personality to on page copy and tell your visitors exactly what they need to be hearing.
Duplicate content provides a lose-lose situation for any website.
It will undermine your SEO efforts and gives the visitor another reason not to trust what you have to say.
Marketing yourself online is all about building trust and confidence in a limited amount of time; to ruin that with what is essentially the simplest of tasks, writing some copy, you will have lost a massive opportunity and will do little to convince your visitors that they are on a site to be trusted.
If you are concentrating on SEO, then content is one of the strongest weapons in your armoury.
Good quality, optimised copy will help to back up your link building and other activities.
Don't succumb to the temptation of shoehorning previously used text; start with a blank page, fresh ideas and watch as your website enjoys the benefits.