13

Why “Content is King” is Even Truer Today

shutterstock_36492283The phrase is often used and in many respects is rather hackneyed but it holds as true today as when it was first suggested by Bill Gates back in the mid-90s. Gates maintained that the Internet represents a means of providing information to people and that they will use it as a tool to satisfy their unquenchable thirst for knowledge. We often hear “content is king” in the world of Internet marketing and it is important to understand why we should consider this statement to be true.

If you’re looking for conversions then you have so many elements to consider. You want to attract visitors to your website of course, first and foremost and whether we like to believe it or not, the quality of the written word on our site is very important in this respect, even before any human being actually reads it. When a visitor has arrived at the site we need to achieve two things. Firstly, we need to make sure that they at least stay there longer than a split second and secondly, we need to convince them to stay by using engaging content.

As we only have a fraction of a second to stop people from clicking the back button, the composition of our site must be visually appealing. Color, composition, structure, graphics and text style are all very important and relative placement can often make the difference. We have all seen those “heat maps” which tell us that someone looks at the “10 o’clock” position on the page first more often than not, for example.

While volumes can be written on website design, it is becoming even more apparent that the quality of the content is equally, or more important. Google, especially is becoming very adept at translating and deciphering the content of your webpage. It appears that they are using the concept of latent semantic indexing (LSI) and automated algorithms really have a very clear idea of relevance. No longer is it good enough to simply ensure that your primary keyword is mentioned an optimum number of times within the body of your webpage. The surrounding verbiage must be relevant and Google is effectively looking for a variety of “secondary” keywords or a synonymic spread of words throughout.

If we believe that Google is trying to mimic artificial intelligence in this way and is now coming close to being able to interpret an article and its relevance just as a human being would, then we must believe that not only is content king, but it is also the rest of the royal family as well.

If we are to attract people to our page first of all, we cannot try and optimize for a keyword alone because the robots will know better. We must optimize for the keyword and make sure that the content is well thought out, laser-targeted and definitely relevant or we are unlikely to be able to attract the “eyes” in the first place. However, when we do get those visitors and we have composed an enticing webpage, then we can be pretty sure that we will be able to satisfy their need for the target content and may stand a much better chance of enticing them into our sales funnel.

Do you believe that content is king or do you have a different view?

Matthew Toren

Comments are closed