Content is more than King, content is everything. Content is the Internet, it's whole raison d'être. No content, no Internet. Poor content, no Internet. Why would anyone bother? Life's too short. We enjoyed perfectly rewarding and satisfactory existences before the Internet. The Internet through it's content is obliged to deliver to earn it's keep. It doesn't exist for it's own sake; it exists as the mechanism, the vehicle and the provider of content, the product of content. Where's the value in a library full of books, all with blank pages, or worse, only references to all the other books (each containing reference to all the other books)?
When we talk about content we're not just talking about professionally written words. We're talking about all forms of social media especially audio and video, and to a degree we're also talking about functionality. Adding value to people's web experience is the key, be it through the provision of a piece of information like a train time, a piece of entertainment in the form of an MP3 or the ability to exchange messages with a friend. Content that realises real emotional and productive returns and that has value to a visitor is the royal content that SEO professionals are referring to in their 'Content is King' mantra (abbreviated from the rather more appropriate but long winded, 'unique, high-quality, unduplicated content is king').
The search engines are seeking the foremost authority on a given subject. They want the most reputable sites and those that know the most on a particular topic. Most of all they want relevance. The most rewarding approach when seeking to legitimately see your site at the top of the heap is not to ask what search engines can do for you, but what you can do for search engines to highlight your site's relevance to search queries. It's not up to the search engines to make your site relevant. Identifying and applying relevance is exactly what SEO Consult excels in.
Good is good and people will gravitate towards quality. "Ask yourself what creates value for your users," Google says. Delivering high quality, informative and well constructed content is what differentiates you from your competition and defines your web presence. Content doesn't have to be 'professional' in the traditional context, just look at the popularity of sites that incorporate Web.2 technologies, for example the user generated content (UGC) on aggregator sites like Youtube. What it does need to do is somehow add value to the user experience. Integrating appropriate content by deep linking from aggregators such as Youtube, or with RSS feeds or Podcasts, if applied strategically, is a particularly useful way of including fresh content on a site.
Web spiders (as with web users) love good, fresh content. Updating that content regularly will encourage both to return to your site repeatedly. In terms of the crawling benefits of fresh content, regular indexing on the search engines will cover a wider range of keywords and phrases, extending site coverage and possibilities of strong search returns over a wider range of words and expressions.
Whilst UGC doesn't necessarily rely on expert content generation, an area that does benefit from careful and considered crafting is the site's copy. The days of the SEO copywriter weaving their magic with perfect keyword selection, placement and density to achieve wondrous top page rankings are long gone (despite what many will try to tell you). That's old school SEO and should be left where it belongs - back in the 1990's.
Of course keywords are still important, especially in titles as engines prefer tight search return matches, but it's more a case of frequency rather than density that improve rankings. What really matters now is time, relevance and trust. Skilled copywriting strikes a tone; it develops themes and inter-relates them over time into a rich, cohesive resource. Content of value is the key and it's authoritative inbound links that reflect a sites worth in the eyes of Internet users and therefore in the eyes of the search engines. Rich, aging content and the links it inspires over time matures search engine trust and authority. In effect high quality content is SEO - SEO is high quality content.
As search engine algorithms move further and further away from old school relevance measurements and increasingly assign site importance and authority to factors such as social media tagging and blog-driven links. Expert copywriters with the ability to clearly understand a client's story and the empathy to represent it to prompt inbound links and consequent conversions are finding themselves becoming vital components in search engine marketing campaigns. SEO Consult offers passionate, professional and hugely experienced writers. Both creative and qualified, our writers are committed to delivering the very best copy solutions to your campaigns.
Before a single word of SEO copy has been written however, the project needs to be scoped and defined.
Audience analysis then defines the ideal site visitors and by using research and surveys we try to get inside the head of the prospective audience to define the campaign's semantic space. Site content will be directed specifically at the target audience in a language that they understand and which appeals to them. Content needs to press the right emotional buttons, to be contextual, to generate positive responses and ultimately inbound links. Similar emotional forces to those that prompt us to buy can also cause us to link, bookmark, Twitter and Digg. Compelling benefits in the form of content provides visitors with the motivation to emotionally invest in a site by visiting it, contribution to forums, linking to it, purchasing from it or fulfilling any other call to action.
Audience analysis and client collaboration enables us to define the environment for intelligent keyword selection - all part of the semantic space definition process. It's important to revisit the keyword formulation step as part of campaign assessment so that we can hone and tweak as necessary.
With the environment defined copywriters, website owners and SEO professionals can get to work evolving the project. It's not a complicated concept really, in fact the clearer and simpler the approach the easier it becomes. Clean, lean, well written HTML, supporting good content is without doubt the easiest, quickest and most reliable way of getting content to your audience. Create the content and the engines will be sure to find it.
For more information on SEO Consult and to find out how we can help develop your Internet presence with high quality content, Contact Us.
