Do you groan when you read, “Did you know that content is king?”. I do. But only because it’s an old phrase that has be over-used and misused countless times.
More and more this year I’m thinking it’s the year of content. Last year was the year of Linkbait. But, lets face it, linkbait is content. A “ten cups of Colombian coffee an hour”, kinda content, but content never the less.
When thinking of content, in the context of a web page, think other words too. Don’t just read this post, think about content in the context of your own web properties.
- facts
- instruction
- intelligence
- knowledge
- lowdown
- material
- news
- report
- wisdom
- word
Content creation is not something that is talked about enough in my tiny seo goldfish bowl world, it seems to be talked about a lot more in the affiliate world, or even the general internet marketing world. Although, you may think it is talked about too much.
Here is why I think it’s important, and this thought was inspired by an anonymous, bad ass, seo I had lunch with this week. You have to create thousands and thousands of pages to get people to your site who are going to convert into pounds and pence. People are searching with increased keyword phrases, people know how to use Google these days. The specific age demographic who spend the most amount of money grew up with Google, they do not know a world without a search engine. They get it.
People are increasingly using 3, 4 and 5 word phrases to search with. How the hell are you going to research and then target a 5 word phrase?. And some of these phrases only get searched for once a month. What use is your fancy keyword tool then?
Actually keyword tools are still very useful, but there are new and different ways to use them. Not sure if I should share right now, but anyway….
The point being that you need thousands of pages of content to pick up this long tail. It’s not simply a long tail issue here because new aspects of the way people use language changes any possibility of predictive seo.
Forget seo.
Concentrate on publishing information which will solve peoples problems, which will naturally create the search phrases that no one else will be competing with.
I hear automated article software being cranked up as we speak, sigh! I’m not against the black hat approach, far from it. If it gets results, do it. But I am more interested in building long term results which act like compound interest. The Warren Buffet approach to seo.
Content creation, backed up with linkbait is my favourite internet marketing strategy right now.
Brian Turner over at Internet Business gets it, Squidoo get it, the New York Times gets it, even digg gets it.
Forget “content is king”, content is seo.