In SEO, content should be your number one priority. Even if you do everything else and don’t contribute much to this topic, you website will fail miserably. Users dig content, but they dig great content even more. What good is a website that has no important content? It isn’t. If you have come to this website to attempt to figure out how to promote a website with no content, shame on you (unless it’s a web application). Let’s break down content into its components:
- Quality – Content must be well written and of high quality.
- Research – Find keywords that are suited for what you want to write about and stick with this controlled vocabulary.
- Words – Use words and phrases that you expect users would search for when looking for your content.
- Engage – Make your content engaging and interesting so they users will never want to leave.
- Fresh – Outdated content stinks something fierce, create new vibrant content as often as you can.
Now, we can discuss each of these terms. Quality is simple. Don’t make typos (unlike me) and structure your sentences well. Consider running your content through spell checking software like Microsoft Word. Also, do not create little tiny pages with less than a couple of paragraphs. On the flip side, do not create a massive document that has like 50 paragraphs.
Research and Words are one of those things that people generally fail to do at the beginning and try to implement later (guilty). If you have studied the Information Architecture tutorials, I discuss the importance of controlled vocabularies. Search engines are quite clever, but let’s face it. They still do not understand the content. They only see the words and maybe even a thesaurus of the words, but they do not “understand” it as we humans do. So, find words that you think your users will use to find your content and stick to using them. Do not being overly annoying with it, but try to use the controlled vocabularies where appropriate.
Engage and Fresh are both very important to users. When I use engage, I don’t mean you have to have your users actively doing tasks. I mean be interesting because you are and you just need to express it in your writing. We all love reading articles that interesting authors write and it makes us more forgiving of things like typos and other errors. Fresh content is pretty self-explanatory. Create content that is awesome as often as you can. Google and users feeds on new content. Feed the Google Monster and feed your fans.
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