Not every site owner is a ‘natural’ writer. In fact, most site owners aren’t. You can cope with this to some extent by accessing professional services, but there will always be times when you need to do the words yourself. For those times, you’re going to need some knowledge of one of the most dreaded subjects of all time: evolving English grammar.

Teachers in countries all over the world spend years of their lives teaching grammar to unthankful students. Grown adults don’t always respond any better than teenagers to the basic rules of written English. If everyone hates it, why should you bother with it on your site?

The simple fact is that even though no-one likes applying grammar themselves, apart from a few sad souls known as ‘editors’, many people dislike grammatical errors even more. If your site’s users spot them on your pages, they will think you are unprofessional, careless or even dumb, harsh as that seems. Your search engine optimisation efforts are wasted if you turn your users away with your content.

This isn’t true with every error on your pages. Writers mess with the rules of English all the time, and most errors will be overlooked. There are one or two major areas that will definitely annoy your site users which you must be careful to avoid. To that end, here are the absolute, all-time, most glaring errors that are commonly seen all over the internet.

• It’s. If you are talking about a thing, rather than a person, you’re likely to use the pronoun ‘it’ quite a lot. When you’re talking about the qualities of that thing, the appropriate word is ‘its’. If you habitually use ‘it’s’, you’re one of millions of people who get it wrong. Basically, an apostrophe should only be used with ‘its’ when you have shortened ‘it is’. People can get confused because apostrophes are used to show possession, for example ‘Bruce’s car.’ When the possessor is an ‘it’, however, you don’t use an apostrophe. Example: ‘The computer has lost all of its fire power. It’s completely dead.’ In other words, the computer’s fire power is gone and it is completely dead

• Your. People often use this word when they mean to contract the words ‘you are.’ This is wrong. ‘Your’ is a pronoun indicating possession, like with ‘I’ve fixed your computer.’ ‘You’re’ is, as stated, the shortening of the two words ‘you are.’ The sentence ‘Your driving me insane’ will drive many people insane, for grammatical reasons

• Too. Too many people forget the extra ‘o’ in ‘too.’ This can be passed off as a typo if it only appears once, but if you’re in the habit of dropping that extra ‘o’, you will annoy your users

No-one expects perfection from every web page, and the occasional mistake is fine. If you don’t want to utterly irritate your site’s users, however, steer clear of the above mistakes. Many businesses find professional writing services helpful for their SEO content. Talk to us at SEO Consult when considering what qualities your site’s content should possess.

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