Content Is King

I wanted to take the opportunity to write a brief article in response to Chris Haddad’s article “Why Your Webiste Sucks” and add a few items while leaving out the word ‘sucks’ as much as possible.

Written Apr 16, 2008, read 267 times since then.

As a bit of a preface, I have worked for small, large and Fortune 500 companies as Internet marketing specialist. My specialties are marketing on all of the major engines, search engine optimization, website content, and landing pages.

If you really want to understand why your web site is working or not working as you had initially intended or planned, you need to ask yourself one question.

WHAT IS THE POURPOSE OF YOUR WEB SITE?

If you don’t know why you built your site in the first place you are wasting your money and effort. However, all is not lost. First, decide if your website is to be used for lead generation, consumer information, B2B information, ecommerce, service sales, etc.

Once you have figured out the WHY of your site you need to fill it with relevant content. One thing most webmasters and website development companies won’t do for you is find the right content and build said content with both your target market in mind and the search engines in mind.

Content is king and that is the most important aspect of what your website says about your company, to your audience and to the search engines. Your website is your calling card to the world. What you say in the pages is of the highest importance. It is the portal to you and your business. A first impression if you will for those that read its pages.

Your sites content needs to be geared to educate the masses and sell your products or services while drawing the attention of the search engines looking to index the content of your site. When you have content that is matched to high volume search terms the more likely it will be for you to be indexed and gain higher natural search rankings. In this regard you have the potential to kill two birds with one stone. Develop excellent content for your audience and excellent content for the search bots or spiders.

Chris Haddad is totally correct about certain attitudes that can be arrogant and oblivious to potential readership. He is also correct that haughty verbiage does not sell anything. So, as you recreate you content, do it with a sense of humility while generating an air of urgency. Short bold messages for calls to action work wonders as does intelligent descriptions of who, what, when, where and why of your company. Oh, and if you are selling on your site, services or products…it is much more important to have results oriented statements than, WE-ARE-SO-AWESOME-BUY FROM-US statements.

Content is so important, I can’t stress it enough. It is not only the message you relay to your visitors but it has a direct impact on higher ranking. For those of you familiar with search engine optimization, it is one of the main ingredients in a successful SEO efforts.

I can continue on regarding your web site and its mission but I only have so many words available. I will share with you two items of note from a recent article I wrote:

1) Content is king when it comes to the engines. Google currently feeds many of the secondary search engines and therefore, typically, is the primary target when optimization is applied to a web site. If the content on the web site is not relevant to popular search queries it must be changed.

2) Key words on the page, location, and how they are displayed are important to a successful SEO endeavor. Having high search volume keywords that are appropriate for your business model and site. Bold faced and italicized keywords at the top of the page and bottom of the page, as it pertains to copy, will help the spiders index then serve the page as a relevant natural search results.

Finally, when you are considering content keep your reader in mind as Chris Hadda pointed out. This article is intended to affirm some of his comments and draw addition lines in the marketing sand for those of you who may not know the Internet marketing space that well.

There is no such thing as too much content. There is such a thing as condescending content, irrelevant copy and sloppy copy…and copy that just sucks. There are more factors about how to make your website excellent on the search engine and for visitors. Starting with you page copy is a really good start. Having a little fun with your words is okay too just don’t overdo it.

So, I don’t leave my readers hanging and I’ve a few words left, keep the following items in mind as well regarding your website. They are search engine optimization related and may help your overall online natural ranking.

Do not buy any links from anyone because certain search engines don’t like it and will ban your site if you are caught. The best practice for link building is link sharing. Ask to exchange website links with trusted business partners, friends, etc, and do your due diligence regarding the content on the cross linking site.

Try to keep visitors engaged on your site with what I like to call THREE CLICKS TO A SOLUTION. Meaning, if visitors can get to the information, service offerings and products they are seeking the more likely they will be to take the desired action you want them to.

I certainly hope I provided all of you with some solid information you can use. I look forward to your comments and tried very hard to not write an article that sucks.

Learn more about the author, Alton J. Duderstadt II.

Comment on this article

Posted by Chris Haddad, Seattle, Washington | Apr 16, 2008

Hi Alton,

Good article. Though when I saw your summary I was gearing up for a fight. =-)

Personally I think that even three clicks can be too much. I can't tell you how often I run into companies who have 5 or 6 pages on their site when one or two will do.

But the big thing is that every page on your site needs to have a purpose and that every page needs to end with some kind of call to action. That could be a call to move to another page, a call to submit a form or anything else. But limp pages . . .err . . .suck.
Posted by ron zisman, pearl river, New York | Apr 16, 2008

hey alton,

totally agreed content is king. then i got lost. what exactly is 'optimization' in terms of search words? i'm somewhat of a newbie at web design. i do clean standards compliant code. i do decent content. i post links to my site whenever possible. but, i get the feeling i'm missing something big. can you put it on the table? thanks much for the article... and the confusion.
Posted by Norbert Mayer-Wittmann, Old Greenwich, Connecticut | Apr 16, 2008

see also this article on businessweek.com and/or my comment in reply to the story.

BTW: Google is no longer very good at identifying valuable content. One reason why Google was good in the early days of the net is that it was mostly university professors/researchers who were writing back then (see also the Wisdom of the Language)