Content for Content's Sake?

It would make sense to create content for no other reason than for search engine optimization, but there's no reason to limit your intent solely to SEO, and in fact your content will be better for SEO if you don't focus solely on SEO. What I mean is that if you focus on the human beings who will be coming to the site and using it, rather than thinking about SEO, you'll often get better results for SEO.

When thinking about human beings and content on a website, the three areas to focus on are:

1. Accessibility
2. Relevance / Usefulness
3. Readability / Quality

Accessibility. How easy is it to find the content from the homepage or from any other page on the site? Chances are if the content is easy for a human to find it's more likely to be picked up by search engines as well. Remember that search engines and therefore humans will not always access your site from the homepage. They may click through to a secondary page of your site that is indexed in a search engine and therefore that secondary page needs to do something to address visitors who haven't seen the rest of the site. I don't mean saying "Hi there" but rather the navigation and content of each page should make sense to a human being, even if that's the first exposure they have to your website.

Relevance / Usefulness. This should be a given, but we mention it anyway. If the content has nothing to do with your website, then there's probably no reason for it to be there. I'd rather focus on the word useful. If content is useful, it's more likely to be visited, get bookmarked, get linked to from other websites, etc., and all of this builds positive SEO results.

Readability / Quality. Is your content interesting? Is it well-written? Search engines may not know the difference, but they are figuring it out, and human beings certainly do. The better your content is written, the more likely people are to trust it, to return to it, to reference it, and as with usefulness, this means better SEO results.

Now changing tracks a little bit, let's think about what search engines want to see in content. Basically, the search engines want to see the same things as human beings, but I would also add a fourth item, which is keywords. If you know what your top 10 keywords are, then you're going to want to make sure those keywords are being used liberally throughout your site. However, one should focus on items 1-3 first, and then review the content while asking the question "Are our keywords already in this content?" It very well may be that no more modifications to your content are needed to focus on keywords. Or it might be that you see opportunities here and there where keywords aren't used, but they could be without negatively affecting items 1-3.

So where does one start?

Getting Started on Content

The content you place on your homepage is going to be more important than the content on any other page of your website. Other than the three points above, make sure you have enough content. A paragraph or two will often do, but try experimenting with more content and more links from the homepage to secondary pages on your site and see what works for your needs.

Here are some further recommendations for developing more content, not necessarily on the homepage.

1. Turn PDFs into HTML content wherever possible. I recognize this doesn't always work, since some PDFs contains content/graphics that aren't easily or conveniently reproduced in HTML, but do try. Often turning one PDF document into HTML can result in 10-20 additional HTML pages on your site, each one of which can be indexed and add to your site's overall page count. It is true that PDFs are indexed by search engines, but HTML is better, and not just better for search engines, but many humans prefer to read an HTML page over a PDF because they find PDFs to be clunky and troublesome to the point that they avoid PDF files altogether. What I would recommend is providing both. Have an HTML page, but on that page have a link to the PDF so that they can save or print it if they want to.

2. Create informational resources. FAQs, articles, etc. Whatever it is you do, you can probably come up with 10-20 pages of content talking about your industry or your products without too much work.

3. Success stories. Not only do they add to the amount of content you have, they're great for showing how whatever it is you do helps real people.

4. Blog. Create a blog, either as part of your site (i.e. yousite.com/blog) or on its own domain and then link liberally to your site from it. Search engines love blogs. The tricky part is often coming up with the strategy, or what to write about. But once you figure that out, the posts don't have to be long, but they do need to be interesting, and the more often you blog, the faster you'll develop content. I recommend posting on any blog at least once per week, if not daily. But if daily posting overwhelms you, try doing it once per week, or even just every other week to start.

This is probably enough to bite off for now. As always, questions and comments are welcome.

digg it!   Add to del.icio.us