So there I was, devoting much too much time to the almost
countless items inundating my inbox, when the title on the more or less daily
e-newsletter devoted to search caused me to do a sort of Holywoodian double
take: Why Quality Content is Key For Search Engines. I enjoy reading
the newsletter where this item appeared. It's a quality
publication and it has lots of information that, although often not particularly
useful to me, keeps me abreast of what's happening in search technologies. But
since it's devoted primarily to search strategies
I was surprised to read that it was also dealing with "content" -
and not only in the title of an article. Admittedly,
for many years already I'd held the belief that the important, defining principle
of a web page was to inform us of something that we perhaps didn't know already,
but I'd grown to understand that I was in a minority. Was I now discovering
that the world was coming around to agreeing with me?
The basic idea behind quality content seems to be
pretty simple, even obvious: people spend time reading web pages because those
pages tell them something that's important and/or informative to them. If they
get to a page that promises information on a particular subject but doesn't
produce, they're not going to stick around for long. This is directly related
to the concept of what I call value-added info.
The basic idea here is a very simple principle: if your company is going to
have a web site to promote itself or sell its wares, it should expand the materials
on the site to include additional information that could be of interest, or
could spark the interest, of somebody who arrives at the site. Though Jakob
Nielsen might think that getting straight to the point is a virtue, I'm inclined
to believe that many searchers are pleased to discover that a site they visit
offers them more than what they came for.
Is content enjoying a resurgence? Have people gotten to
the point at which they realize that all the pyrotechnics that jazz up a site
are useless if you don't have a point worth being made? Or perhaps we're dealing
with something that isn't new at all, and only the more or less natural
ebb and flow of writing about the internet brings it again to those web
seas that I seem to sail. Back in 1996, for instance, Bill Gates told us that
Content is King. And of course he's not
the only one making this claim, though just how a web site is supposed to
go about getting content is another question.
How a site goes about getting content may be "another
question", but it's a question that seems to sidestep the actual central
question - what sort of site has to "get" content. To my mind, there's
a very basic cart and horse issue involved here. I seem to come from the old
school - my basic assumption is that someone builds a web site because that
person, or group, or company, possesses knowledge or information - let's call
it content - that they want to make available to others. If they don't have
that content to begin with, frankly I find it hard to understand why they'd
want a web site to begin with, and their attempts
at getting content to fuel a web site seem even comical. Even years ago,
when personal web sites were still the rage, and people were posting all the
records they'd bought, the books they'd read, the meals
they'd eaten, we understood that this was the content that the people behind
the sites wanted, for some reason, to make available to us. They didn't copy
somebody else's list of books read in order to
have something to post on their sites. But of course all this only suggests
that perhaps this possibly renewed interest in content,
rather than signifying a return to an emphasis on what really matters on the
web, only shows us how far we've actually strayed from those basics.
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