The Web Its ALL About Content
The Web Its ALL About Content
Jim Schakenbach
Managing Partner, SCT Group Inc.
www.TechnologyMarketing.info
Here’s a shocker: Talk to any dozen corporate executives about what makes a good web site and more often than not you’ll hear about eye-catching graphics, sexy animation, sophisticated page layouts, easy navigation. You’ll hear about everything except what’s really important: words.
That’s right. What makes the World Wide Web spin? Content. Not video. Not audio. Not vaguely futuristic, edgy graphics. Words make the web go round. So how come no one really talks about the text that goes into every web site? Because it’s not sexy. Conventional wisdom says words are dull and hard to come by. Text is a grind to write and no ones wants to think about it, much less do it. But guess what? Words are what give your site value, searchability, stickiness and everything else that is good and noble. If you want to edge out your competition, gain the coveted higher ground in search engines, and generally boost the relevance of your site, I’m going to let you in on few secrets:
Add pages.
Have you ever noticed those sites with interminable scrolling pages? Miles of text unrolling in an endless scroll. It seems like page after page of solid data. But guess what? It’s just ONE page, and that make a mighty small target for search engines. The smart thing is to break up those big scrolls into individual pages along logical lines – separate out, say, products from customer service, company backgrounder from news, and so on. Just this simple fix will fatten your site from one page to perhaps a dozen without adding any new content.
Pay attention to headlines.
Here’s another mistake you see all the time: a lame, nebulous headline such as “tomorrow’s technology today”. Let’s say your company makes oscillators for wireless communications; a much better headline would be “Oscillators for tomorrow’s wireless applications”. Now, that may not be the most creative headline, but here’s the magic – you just went from a headline that’s worthless in a search to one that will generate solid leads from viewers looking for oscillators or anything about wireless applications. Headlines featuring keywords hold the greatest value because search engines figure that if a key word or phrase is in a headline, that page is going to have the most content for that term.
Supercharge your text.
Now, go a step further and make sure your text – called the body copy – contains as many of the important words and phrases as possible without making it sound weird. Again, the more key words that pop up in context on a page, the more valuable it is – and the higher it ranks – compared to a page of similar content, but with fewer key words in the copy.Work your keywords.
Remember the pages you added earlier? That now enables you to spread the wealth of key words around. Instead of just one, long page, you now have a number of pages, each ready to receive pertinent key words that will work in conjunction with the page contents to achieve better searchability. Lazy people just copy one set of keywords and plop it onto every page. That is a costly mistake. The fewer and less varied the key words on your site, the worse your site will do in searches. Make sure your key words are pertinent to the page they’re on – search engines value pages with relevant keywords and content more than pages with words that are seemingly unrelated.
Archive, archive, archive.
Does your webmaster like to take down documents when they’re “old”? If so, run down the hall and stop them right now. Just because that white paper, PowerPoint presentation, or technical article is months old doesn’t mean it’s lost its value. People search the web for information, and if the presentation you gave last month at the annual industry conference contained interesting, relevant information but is now longer appropriate for the immediacy of home page prominence, move it into an archive section or resources page. Key word it, make it searchable, and you’ll be surprised how many people actually click on it. The more content on your site the better.
Beware of designers.
While that is certainly not meant to be a blanket indictment of web designers in general, it is intended to be a word of caution concerning designers bent on design for design’s sake. Those who have an over-fondness for things graphical, like fancy phototype that’s rendered as a graphic image. To the casual viewer it may look like words, but to a search engine it’s just another image and not searchable. Web designers will often choose flash and sex appeal over solid content – after all, they’re designers, not copywriters. As we know, words aren’t sexy. But like the slow, solid draft horse out in the field, they’re what get the job done.
Be strong in the face of animation and large photos that take up inordinate amounts of space on a web page – they are the enemy of search engines and, like cotton candy, may taste great, but offer little nutritional value. If you want to build a strong, healthy site, you need to bulk up on real content, and that’s words. That’s not to say your site shouldn’t be sophisticated and attractive – it should. Just be sure you balance an eye-catching, visually-creative site with solid, valuable content to attract more viewers, more often.
Make it easy to refresh.
Once you have your site filled with great content, make sure it’s easy to refresh without having to get your site designer to rebuild your pages. Then update your content as often as possible so it stays relevant and valuable. The more often you do it, the less of a chore it is. Post those press releases and product announcements. Promote your new hires and business wins. A little goes a long way. Pay attention to the words, not just the graphics or how the site navigates. Remember, content is king. Ignore it at your own peril.
The Web Its ALL About Content - To learn more about this author, visit Mike Toomey's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
The Web – It's ALL About Content
Jim Schakenbach
Managing Partner, SCT Group Inc.
www.TechnologyMarketing.info
Here’s a shocker: Talk to any dozen corporate executives about what makes a good web site and more often than not you’ll hear about eye-catching graphics, sexy animation, sophisticated page layouts, easy navigation. You’ll hear about everything except what’s really important: words.
That’s right. What makes the World Wide Web spin? Content. Not video. Not audio. Not vaguely futuristic, edgy graphics. Words make the web go round. So how come no one really talks about the text that goes into every web site? Because it’s not sexy. Conventional wisdom says words are dull and hard to come by. Text is a grind to write and no ones wants to think about it, much less do it. But guess what? Words are what give your site value, searchability, stickiness and everything else that is good and noble. If you want to edge out your competition, gain the coveted higher ground in search engines, and generally boost the relevance of your site, I’m going to let you in on few secrets:
Add pages.
Have you ever noticed those sites with interminable scrolling pages? Miles of text unrolling in an endless scroll. It seems like page after page of solid data. But guess what? It’s just ONE page, and that make a mighty small target for search engines. The smart thing is to break up those big scrolls into individual pages along logical lines – separate out, say, products from customer service, company backgrounder from news, and so on. Just this simple fix will fatten your site from one page to perhaps a dozen without adding any new content.
Pay attention to headlines.
Here’s another mistake you see all the time: a lame, nebulous headline such as “tomorrow’s technology today”. Let’s say your company makes oscillators for wireless communications; a much better headline would be “Oscillators for tomorrow’s wireless applications”. Now, that may not be the most creative headline, but here’s the magic – you just went from a headline that’s worthless in a search to one that will generate solid leads from viewers looking for oscillators or anything about wireless applications. Headlines featuring keywords hold the greatest value because search engines figure that if a key word or phrase is in a headline, that page is going to have the most content for that term.
Supercharge your text.
Now, go a step further and make sure your text – called the body copy – contains as many of the important words and phrases as possible without making it sound weird. Again, the more key words that pop up in context on a page, the more valuable it is – and the higher it ranks – compared to a page of similar content, but with fewer key words in the copy.Work your keywords.
Remember the pages you added earlier? That now enables you to spread the wealth of key words around. Instead of just one, long page, you now have a number of pages, each ready to receive pertinent key words that will work in conjunction with the page contents to achieve better searchability. Lazy people just copy one set of keywords and plop it onto every page. That is a costly mistake. The fewer and less varied the key words on your site, the worse your site will do in searches. Make sure your key words are pertinent to the page they’re on – search engines value pages with relevant keywords and content more than pages with words that are seemingly unrelated.
Archive, archive, archive.
Does your webmaster like to take down documents when they’re “old”? If so, run down the hall and stop them right now. Just because that white paper, PowerPoint presentation, or technical article is months old doesn’t mean it’s lost its value. People search the web for information, and if the presentation you gave last month at the annual industry conference contained interesting, relevant information but is now longer appropriate for the immediacy of home page prominence, move it into an archive section or resources page. Key word it, make it searchable, and you’ll be surprised how many people actually click on it. The more content on your site the better.
Beware of designers.
While that is certainly not meant to be a blanket indictment of web designers in general, it is intended to be a word of caution concerning designers bent on design for design’s sake. Those who have an over-fondness for things graphical, like fancy phototype that’s rendered as a graphic image. To the casual viewer it may look like words, but to a search engine it’s just another image and not searchable. Web designers will often choose flash and sex appeal over solid content – after all, they’re designers, not copywriters. As we know, words aren’t sexy. But like the slow, solid draft horse out in the field, they’re what get the job done.
Be strong in the face of animation and large photos that take up inordinate amounts of space on a web page – they are the enemy of search engines and, like cotton candy, may taste great, but offer little nutritional value. If you want to build a strong, healthy site, you need to bulk up on real content, and that’s words. That’s not to say your site shouldn’t be sophisticated and attractive – it should. Just be sure you balance an eye-catching, visually-creative site with solid, valuable content to attract more viewers, more often.
Make it easy to refresh.
Once you have your site filled with great content, make sure it’s easy to refresh without having to get your site designer to rebuild your pages. Then update your content as often as possible so it stays relevant and valuable. The more often you do it, the less of a chore it is. Post those press releases and product announcements. Promote your new hires and business wins. A little goes a long way. Pay attention to the words, not just the graphics or how the site navigates. Remember, content is king. Ignore it at your own peril.
The Web Its ALL About Content - To learn more about this author, visit Mike Toomey's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
| |||
 |
No article feedback found. | ||
|
Leave Your Feedback | ||
|
|||
 Key Factors In SEO
| |||
| These are the key components to have a successful site that gets good ranking in Search Engines. They just like these sites. |
|||
|
How Fresh Content May Catapult Your Website Ranking At The Top!
| |||
| It used to be that the content didn't really matter and this is why unethical black hat strategies were so effective. Nowadays though content does matter and search engines are always going to prefer original conten... |
|||
|
How to Avoid Duplicate Content and Generate Inbound Links
| |||
| Duplicate content can have a negative impact on your search engine results. The question on everyone’s mind today is how to best manage your website content and avoid being penalized by Google and other major search... |
|||
|
Why Web Content is King
| |||
| Many business owners feel that it's good enough for their company's web site to use a great design and well written content to inform visitors about the company and its products. Having an effective web site is imp... |
|||
|
Creating Quality Content For SEO
| |||
| It is an old and well-accepted cliché that "Content is king". Content is also time consuming, resource intensive and vital to the success of a Web site in the search engines. |
|||
| |||
Michel NerayMichel Neray has over 25 years of experience as an award-winning copywriter, an Internet pioneer, a tradeshow pitchman and a senior sales and marketing executive. An online pioneer, he was one of the first marketing professionals to embrace the Internet by building websites as early as 1993. In 1994, Michel co-authored a book entitled "The Great Crossover: Personal Confidence in the Age of the Microchip", which made it to Jack Canfield's Achiever's Recommended Reading List. Michel founded Portfolios.com in 1995, the world's first online source directory for creative professionals and one of the first websites based on community generated content. Since creating The Essential Message in 2003, Michel has helped thousands of independent professionals and entrepreneurs as well as growing corporations find a better way to differentiate, position and brand themselves. In 2005, his chapter "Everything Starts With A Conversation" was selected as the lead for the book, "Sales Gurus Speak Out" and re-published in 2008 for 'Awakening The Workplace Volume 3'. He is also a co-author of "In the Company of Leaders" (2008) with 40 top North American leadership experts. - Visit Michel Neray's Website |
|||
|
To learn more about the Evan Elite Author Program please contact us. | |||
 | |
 Mike Toomey (Visit Mike's Website)
|  |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
| Modeling the Masters: Learn the true secrets behind Walt Disney's business success factors & grow your company! Video produced by Phanta Media |
|
|
 |
| Have you written articles that would be of value to entrepreneurs? Become an expert on our site by publishing them! Expose yourself to a wide audience, drive more traffic to your website and get more sales! Click Here for details. |
 |
 | ||
|
||
 |
||
 |
||
|
| ||
|
|
|
Get advice & tips from famous business owners, new articles by entrepreneur experts, my latest website updates, & special sneak peaks at what's to come!
|
|
|
 |
 SEO Made Easy Human Resources Checklist How Search Engines Work Ideal Client Goal Setting |
|
 | ||
 |
Top 50 HR Blogs 2009
Top 50 HR Blogs 2009 | |
 |
The Top 10 Guy Kawasaki Posts
Best Posts for Entrepreneurs | |
| ||
 |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
||||||||||||
