The act of adding content to websites for ranking purposes is relatively new in the world of SEO. Many SEO companies have only recently begun offering content writing as a service for their clients, to complement their more traditional Internet marketing services.
As a result of content being relatively new, the perception of content remains unclear in the minds of many. After all, most people understand the concept of search engine optimisation. You make changes to a website to ensure that it’s optimised well for search engines, so that it ranks better in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
It’s a process that is generally done once to a website and is then supported by an off-page campaign that aids the website’s rankings. While the intricacies of SEO remain very complex, the notion of SEO is fairly well known.
Why then is content so shrouded in confusion? What is essentially a very simple thing to do (in contrast to SEO) is still relatively hard to understand for many people, including Internet marketing companies, again in contrast to SEO.
The reason you should add content to your website is very simple. The more content you add, the more often your site will be indexed, the more pages you will have to rank within Google, the more search terms you will rank for and, ultimately, the more traffic you will receive. The key though – and this is the part that seems very hard for some people to grasp – is to update your content regularly. If you update your site every day for a month and then leave it for six weeks, you’re wasting your time. If you add nothing for a month and then upload twenty pages at once, you’re wasting your time.
To put it as simply as possible (and here comes the science bit) Google has become the most successful search engine in the world by offering its users the most relevant results to their queries. If Google offered up useless websites to a user’s search, the user wouldn’t use Google again (which is what MSN, Live.com, or whatever it’s called this week does).
Now, when a website is SEOd, the SEO work tells Google what the website is about. It lets Google know what the website should be classified as and what the context of the website is. What content does is offer Google pages of information which it can use to show its users answers to their search queries. As Google wants to offer its users information, you’re helping Google fulfil its purpose and helping it to make money from its sponsored links.
Without regular content, Google has no real reason to offer your website as an answer to a user’s search.
Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer
