March 22nd, 2008

In the early days of the internet the mantra was “content is king.” Once the spammers and scammers got smart enough, that fell away, but the good guys at Google have better programmers and smarter systems, so lucky for readers, those days are back. Content is once again king, even if it’s a throne he’s forced to share with some other important elements.

It’s unfortunate for webmasters who want a cheap and easy way to bring eyeballs to their sites, though, since content is far more work than installing a system to trick the search engines. That’s okay for you, though, because those eyeballs would resent you anyhow for stuffing the ballot box in your favor, as it were.

If content is the king, relevance is his crown and scepter

When the shift to content came back the first thing the tricksters did was create endless pages full of random words. That’s content all right, but it sure as heck isn’t very useful. Tricks like that didn’t work for very long, and they almost never work now. When they do sneak through the system, you get angry readers and risk being blacklisted by the search engines.

How can you be relevant? It all depends on what you do. If you make widgets, talk about how you make them and what purpose they serve. If you offer landscaping, talk about shrubs and bulbs. Whatever your area of expertise is, that’s what you need to talk about.

Stepping up the content

If you want more content but don’t have the time, ability or inclination to do it yourself, consider hiring a professional to take over the responsibilities for you, or at least supplement your own writing.

Many web design firms have writers on staff for just this purpose. People like this are most commonly used to complete content pages for site’s “About Us” and “Products & Services” pages, but many are capable and experienced writers who can write news articles, blog entries or detailed product descriptions for your site.

There’s a fair chance your existing web site is already equipped to handle such regular additions of fresh content, or that your site can easily be reconfigured for it. When in doubt, just ask.

The only thing better than lots of relevant content

A large volume of relevant content is great, so the only thing better is regularly updated text content. If you commit to adding even one or two new articles or pages per week, search engines will be more likely to come back often, and so will your organic readers.

Once a search engine recognizes that you regularly update your content, they’ll realize that the site is an actual living entity on the web, for lack of a better way to describe it, and your rankings within your key search terms will improve.

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