All Hail, Content!

There’s an old maxim in the publishing industry: “Content is King.” In an Internet age, however, this notion is no longer restricted to print publishers. Even information giants, from Google to Amazon, recognize the value for bringing in content to enlighten users, engage customers, and attract business. Once upon a time, for most businesses, it was enough to be an online box store, little more than a catalog and a brochure gone digital. But those days are behind us. There are good reasons now to treat content as king in every industry, reasons that have a lot to do with how modern marketing works.

When browsers like Mosaic turned our computers’ green screens into visually-rich web pages, businesses saw an opportunity to advertise their goods and services without having to spend exorbitant amounts on newspaper advertisements and printed mailers. But what seemed paradise at first became just another tough environment as other businesses joined in. Now those first owners of Internet real estate no longer had the block to themselves. The money they might have saved on print ads had to pay for ways to separate themselves from the pack. And how were they to stand out from the many businesses cluttering what had truly become a “World Wide Web”?

Enter the search engine. Lycos, Altavista, Excite—these and other “webcrawler” utilities indexed the millions—soon-to-become billions—of webpages, letting users locate exactly what they wanted. But like any market, with millions of individuals affecting its shape, new actors entered the fray looking to game the system. The net result was a competition among search engines for effectiveness, measured not only by number of pages indexed or how often but by the quality of the results. Welcome to the rise of Google! And it is because of Google that content—and not just indexing—is once again king.

In today’s environment, businesses struggle to grab the attention of current and new customers. Instead of spending oodles of cash on print advertising—no doubt contributing to the decline of newspapers—they hunt for search engine optimization (SEO) specialists. In a world where showing up among the first 5 to 10 hits on Google may determine whether your balance sheet runs black or bleeds red, is it any surprise some firms are willing to pay top dollar for SEO services?

But SEO work is not a mystery. Much of Google’s rise to the top can be attributed to its learning better than its competitors how to stay ahead of those trying to game search engine results. Although many of the technological intricacies of its search algorithm remain trade secrets—as they should—Google has not entirely concealed what it looks for when figuring out where to place a website in its organic search results. There are the obvious components, such as keywords and links from other sites. But there are less obvious, more work intensive, but utterly necessary ways of evaluating a website’s organic rank. Here's why.

I learned this from a friend who runs an electronic coupon business where SEO means everything to his success.

Now for an all-electronic business, you’d think it would be enough to have a large database of vendors' coupons and individual coupon links. Apparently it wasn’t for him, which is why he decided to embed a blog within his site. This is because one element that Google and other search engines factor into a site’s value is how often and how much its content changes. How this is done is not hard to figure out. If you’ve ever looked closely at your Google search results, you’ll notice the “cache” link, described by Google as a “snapshot” of the web page last taken on a certain date. It doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to recognize that any search engine revisiting a site compares its last “cached” version against the site’s current state. No change detected, the search engine will assume, among other things, that the site is idle and little maintained. Not good for business. If the site is changing, then the program's determination of how often, how much, and in what way can all have an effect on the site's organic rank.

Of course, I should add that if your site successfully climbs the organic search chain, you probably have an obligation to supply quality content. My friend certainly thought so. Originally he outsourced the writing of blog entries to overseas help. Cheap, but the results were poor. Then he plunked down some real money on a writer to deliver a daily description of each new couponed business on his website (and with 1,300, that’s a lot of writing). Suddenly he saw a difference, as the writer supplied day after day a blog entry of several hundred words, with internal and external links and a keyword-rich vocabulary, all critical components in Google’s analysis of your site’s relevance to prospective searchers. Now his site maintains one of the five top spots in most searches for electronic coupons, in part because he recognized the value of adding new and relevant data on a continuing basis to his website—the key to his business’s success.

Marketing on the Web, as I’ve advised clients on a regular basis, entails among other things a steady stream of writing, preferably related to their business in one way or another. Too many unwisely see that as unnecessary busy work, not worth the money spent. Naturally enough, the web-traffic results are not great for their business. But for those who do put some money behind supplying regularly scheduled information on their sites related to their business, the results can be remarkable.