Content is King–Long Live Content!

You hear it time after time when building a website. Content is King

Why?

Why Unique Content?

Having unique content is key to building a successful website.

  • Unique content builds links from trusted sources as an afterthought.
  • Unique content makes you the authority source. You’re not regurgitating information.
  • Unique content establishes credibility amongst your readers and builds a following.

Why Frequent Content?

  • Search engines love frequent content–blogs are preferred often because they’re up-to-date.
  • Users love frequent content. When your site is updated on a regular basis, users know when to expect an update–visiting more frequently.
  • Frequent content establishes momentum. Momentum is an extremely powerful tool for developing a website.

So what does all this mean?

This means stop focusing on SEO. It’s a small fraction of the big picture. Yes it’s important.

Content is more important. Way more important. 100x more important.

You can have the best SEO’d site in the world–without content it’s useless.

Contrary, you can have the worst SEO’d site in the world, and you’ll probably still rank well if you have golden content.

Obviously there’s exceptions to this. Don’t design in Flash, search engines are still learning how to read this.

Search engines don’t read Javascript very well if at all. Any Javascript is for your users only.

Practical advice

Focus on making your site readable to search engines. This means:

  • What your content is about in your title.
  • What your content is about again in your header tag.
  • Important content up top.

This is more for web accessibility than for SEO, but applies to both.

Then, forget about SEO and focus on content. Content content content content. Unique content. Cutting edge content. Focus on content for users, not search engines. Search engines will follow the users.

Are you sure?

Yes I’m sure. Here’s an example from my current site MacTips.

MacTips has been established for over 2 years now. Just recently it’s begun getting regular content again. I’ve been getting decent search engine traffic for a while, but today the floodgates opened and traffic started pouring in.

This is a direct result of frequent and unique content.

mactips-mint.png

I’ve hit my goal of 5,000 visitors per day 4 months ahead of schedule.

Regular and unique content has brought links from popular sites such as Gizmodo, LifeHacker and TUAW.

Also, a community is starting to develop–which is my #1 goal for MacTips.

This is where building a site gets very exciting. Large enough to make a difference but small enough to grow exponentially.

Conclusion

Focus on your users and you won’t go wrong. Your users give your site life. Without them you have a bunch of pages on a webserver.

With them, you have a vibrant and active community with ideas, expressions and most importantly momentum.

Note: The stats for MacTips are publicly available at http://www.mactips.org/mint/.

Content is King–Long Live Content! was posted by Brad on 1/2/2008 at 11:52 pm. It was categorized in Building Traffic. There have been 4 comments.

4 Comments on “Content is King–Long Live Content!”

  1. Congrats on your success. I, too, have always found that the more (quality and quantity) content, the more (quality and quantity) feedback I get.. may it be subscribers, comments, visits and so on.
    By Devin on January 3rd, 2008 at 5:11 am

  2. [...] goes back to my Content is King post. All the other marketing, design, programming, SEO and newsletter stuff is fine–but [...]
    By Innovative Content Brings the Best Visitor - Brad Jasper’s Blog on February 12th, 2008 at 10:54 pm

  3. [...] to MacTips? I’m taking two approaches here I think will work well. Let me state without quality content, neither of these ideas will [...]
    By Creating A Plan For Success - Brad Jasper’s Blog on February 24th, 2008 at 11:04 pm

  4. [...] cross-linking like this: Quality content is important when building your Web site, but its also important to have a plan for [...]
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