Why Content is King

The famed adage "content is king" is unlikely to be lost on hubbers who already appreciate the fact that great website content draws and holds visitors. However, many commercial web sites still fail to see the value in having lots of high-quality website content. Instead they prefer to focus on generating traffic rather than generating content.

When I first meet with a new client, they are often so wrapped up with Search Engine Placement, with being "number 1 in Google" that they are shockingly indifferent to the actual content of their website.

Its at this point that I have to explain that having lots of good content not only keeps visitors interested in your website, but also helps drive traffic to your site. Its this second part which is not very well understood so its this that I shall focus on.

Increase your chances of being found

If you have more content on your site, then you have more potential landing pages or points of entry to your site. For starters your site will be more relevant to a greater number of search terms giving you a greater chance of being found in search engines like Google.

Having different types of content is also important. Text content is important for search engine placement, but have you looked at a search results page recently? Have you noticed that "image results" and "video results" are also shown?

To take advantage of this you need to ensure you have well labelled images on your site and ideally you should also produce some kind of video material and upload to it YouTube. If you describe your video and audio content correctly you'll see it popping up in the search results too.

Get your content out there

Content on your own site is great, but given the importance of inlinks (other relevant websites linking to you) in search engine algorithms, its crucial that you get your content on other websites, complete with links back to your own.

For content which is primarily text based, you can't do any better than HubPages, however, you might also want to try publishing a lens on Squidoo. By publishing content on these sites you are effectively creating another web page which can be linked to your main website. This is not just about inlinks though, remember it gives you another opportunity to get your content listed in the search engines, so make it good, interesting content, otherwise people won't read it and won't click-through to your main site.

Google and Yahoo both have photo sharing community sites (Picasa Web Albums and Flickr respectively). Create a profile on these sites and upload and label your photos. You can frequently link your profile back to your main web site. Image results from these site tend to feature heavily in the image search results of the respective search engines.

We've already talked about how video content uploaded to YouTube can also feature in the Search Results, but remember that there are often opportunities to link your content directly back to your website. Take these opportunities.

Social is Viral

Social networking sites like Facebook are set to eclipse search engines as the most popular sites on the web so having a presence on these sites is becoming central to on-line success. As ever to succeed with Facebook you need to be publishing good content and sharing it with your network of friends and fans. If you are producing good stuff then they in-turn will share your material with their friends, your reach grows as social networking goes viral.

The same can be said of Twitter, which combines a micro-blogging service with social networking. Both a Twitter Profile and a Facebook Page offer you the chance to get your quality content on other sites and link it back to your own for free!

Summary

Adding good quality content to your own site increases your chances of being found in the search engines and holds a visitor's attention whilst they are on your site.

Getting your original content out on other websites increases the chances of having your content found, can channel visitors to your main business website and by virtue of giving you free inlinks can help boost your Link Popularity and Link Relevance which are two of the three central tenants of search engine success. The 3rd is having good relevant content to begin with.

So "content is king".