Why Content is King
Before you bash your head against the keyboard in exasperation at stumbling across yet another “content is king” article, give me a few seconds to convince you this one is worth your time. If you read what I have to say and apply these principles to your own efforts, your websites will be more successful and you’ll make more money.
Instead of just yammering “content is king” over and over, I’ll explain why content is king and how it helps your websites. From here on out, you won’t have to wonder why you spend so much time grinding away in front of the computer, writing article after article until your eyes bleed.
Out of all the SEO efforts you can make for a website, writing good, quality content is the most important thing you can do. There is no substitute for quality content. You can do all the link building and viral marketing you want but if you don’t have quality content, your visitors are going to find your website useless.
There are three main benefits that quality content brings to a website:
- Links
- Google Traffic
- Satisfied Visitors
Links
When you provide useful, original content, your readers will recognize it and be more likely to link to you on their own websites, blogs and in discussion forums. As you get more links, your high quality content is exposed to even more people who provide you with even more links. It’s a perfect example of the snowball effect.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found links to one of my poker strategy websites in random internet forums. The reason they’re willing to link to it is because it provides unique, high quality poker strategy content. It’s not because the website is pretty or has a great SEO structure. It’s because the website gives users what they want: information.
In addition to inbound link power, a website full of content also benefits from internal linking power. As you get more and more articles posted on your site, you’ll find more and more opportunities to link between those articles.
Internal linking makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site and it improves your rankings in search engine results. It also makes your website “stickier,” which means visitors will stick around longer and explore your site further. If you get your visitor to read one high quality article, that person will be likely to click on a link you included to another related article. And then that article will have links to other related articles.
A great example of using internal links to create stickiness is the Cracked.com website. I lose track of time every time I visit that site because every single article has links to other articles. By the time I finish reading one article, I have five tabs opened up to other articles, all of which have links to even more articles! It’s a horrible time waster which means it is an absolute success.
Google Traffic
High quality content will work wonders for your website in Google and other search engines. First of all, the inbound links you get from other sites are used in Google’s search algorithm do determine how highly you rank for the search terms visitors type in to Google. In other words, you’ll be more likely to appear on the first page of search results if you have a lot of people linking to you.
Second, having lots of high quality content means your website will be more likely to rank for long tail keywords. People type in all sorts of things into Google and if you have a lot of content, you’ll see visitors arriving at your website after typing in keywords you never even intended to hit.
In fact, if you looked at the keywords people used to reach one of my websites last month, you’d see that only about 15 of the keywords brought more than 10 visitors to my website. After that, there are almost 800 different keywords that each brought 1 visitor per month to that same site. The long tail keywords, and not my main keywords, bring that site the vast majority of its traffic.
A cool little side benefit to long tail hits is that you can use those hits to brainstorm new ideas for content. When you check your visitor logs, you’ll see that people type in all sorts of weird things into Google to end up at your site. On my poker site, for example, I noticed dozens of variations of a certain long tail keyword and made sure to attack that keyword deliberately. Almost instantly, I got an increase in traffic.
Satisfied Visitors
You can never forget about the human element when creating a website. High quality content is appealing to your readers, and you can bet your butt that they know the difference between the same old repeated drivel and in-depth, unique content.
When you satisfy your visitors with high quality content, it leaves them with a positive impression of your website. This means you’ll get repeat visitors and a constant flow of traffic to your site. The more your visitors return to your site, the more likely they are to make a purchase or sign up at whatever poker sites you promote.
Satisfied visitors result in more conversions because after seeing your website, they feel like you know what you’re talking about. They can tell that you took the time to provide them with something useful (and not just another sales pitch) and they’ll take your word for where they should sign up. Remember this: content yields trust and trust yields conversions.
Your satisfied, repeat visitors will also be sure to spread the good word about your website. They’ll tell their friends about it, write about it in forums and link to it on websites. This brings us back to the link building aspect again, which goes to show how synergistic these three factors are.
Sit Down and Write
Now that you know why content is king, the only thing you need to do is actually sit down and write. Writing high quality content sounds like it requires more effort but it’s actually easier than re-hashing the same old topics over and over again. Once you get started on a high quality piece, you’ll find yourself dragged into it. Before you know it, you’ve written a thousand word article that you can be proud of. Keep it up and you’ll soon reap the rewards of owning a unique, high quality website.
This post was kindly provided by Jeremy Miller from Gambling Sites.