is that they’ve been all over the ‘net and are smart enough to know that they have been fed a particular bit of contents before. If you’re relying too heavily on pre-written content pages then your site won’t rank well because they don’t feel you bring enough new contents to the table. If most of your site’s contents are already available elsewhere then why should they promote your version of it? You have to have mostly unique contents or you won’t stand out.  Use should always use pre-written content as what they're intended for....a starting point.

 

The same thing goes for uniqueness, as even if you were to sit down and build a “textbook perfect” website (if such a thing existed) if you never changed anything on it after launch then eventually its ranking would start to slip. If they come back to your site periodically and nothing ever changes then after awhile they’ll start to wonder about how relevant your contents are. Is it stale? Is your competition’s site more recent and therefore more likely to be current info? If enough time passes then your ranking could drop completely, as they may just consider your site “abandoned”. You definitely don’t want it to get that bad.

 

Luckily, on both counts, you’ve got two things working in your favor:

 

1.       A little bit of work goes a long way. Not every nook and cranny of your site has to be unique. Things like real estate glossaries, checklists, calculators, or other general info pages are probably fine to leave as-is. Those are there as visitor “tools” and not really “search engine fodder” on their own. However, any pages that you feel are your “highlights” that are important to you and want to make sure are being ranked well should be as custom as possible. 60% or more uniqueness is a figure I hear thrown around a lot these days, so make sure if you have 20 buttons that at least 12 have been customized and that those pages have been tweaked enough to where most of it is worded differently from what was there by default.

Freshness is the same way. Not every page needs to see updates, and most search engines understand that some things you’re just going to get right the first time and then never touch again. However, having a few pages that change every now and then (or maintaining a blog regularly, such as twice a month) is enough to keep them checking back in for the latest contents and making sure your ranking never dips.

 

2.       We’ve specifically designed a feature of our XSites to take care of this for you to some degree. We call it “GhostWriter” (check out this video or guide), and it is designed to take our default, pre-written content pages and “mix them up” a bit to make them unique so you don’t have to. It works about the same way you might if you were trying to rephrase something: it substitutes a word here and there, uses a different phrase that means the same thing, moves bullet points or sentence fragments around, and just generally plays around with the contents so it reads the same way but is worded uniquely.

We’ve “trained” our GhostWriter program on a per page basis to make sure it actually understands the topic at hand (so it doesn’t start mixing in seller focus on a buyer-oriented page, for example), and as long as you like what we have to say on a page then flipping the switch to let Ghostwriter take over that page will take a lot of word-tweaking off of your plate and give you one more page tipping the scale in your favor with both uniqueness and freshness. Also, we run GhostWriter once for every new website to make sure you start with unique contents on those pages, so they’re “safe” to use right out of the gate without any manual tweaking necessary.