You NEED Content for Online Success!

There is a saying with respect to Internet Marketing: Content is King

What exactly is meant by “content”? Content is the text part of your website. Search engines use the content of your pages in order to determine how to rank them for specific searches. Search engines do no care how pretty (or cheesy) you site looks. An ugly site will often rank higher in the search engines if it has better content (and some other factors).

Flash movies on a site look cool, but Google and Yahoo can’t “read” flash. If a lot of your content is presented in Flash, the search engines won’t have a clue as to what your page is about.

You must write your content so that it is compelling for human visitors to read and also it must speak to the search engines. If your page is about growing carrots, you might expect people interested in the subject to type “growing carrots” into a search engine. Your page needs to be optimized for “growing carrots” in order to convince the search engines that they should rank your site well for a search of “growing carrots”.

When I use the term “optimize”, I am talking about SEO…Search Engine Optimization. I cover SEO in some detail on my site. In my opinion, SEO is one of the most important skills you can have as Internet marketer! Also, as a beginner, DO NOT get too fancy and do things you don't understand that might end up getting you BANNED by Google! Read about these Black Hat SEO techniques!

So where do you get content? Most people write it themselves. This is why I always suggest only building sites around niches you know something about. Having to research a topic before writing the content will require much time. It is far better if you can write most of the content “off the top of your head”…like I am doing here!

Some people hire writers to write content for them. I have used freelance writers before for some of my very niche sites where the copy is not as important to me. Many freelancers are OK, but I often had to edit their work somewhat in order to better fit the theme of my website. Expect to pay around twelve dollars per 500 words for average work and up to one hundred dollars for a first class job.

I prefer to write my content myself if I have enough time. Remember that the content MUST be original! If you have several websites, you can’t take one of your pages and just copy it to another site. This action will be penalized by the search engines as being “duplicate content”. I often take one of my own articles and rewrite it for another site. There are many scam products out there which promise easy methods for doing this.

There is a website called CopyScape where you can plug in a URL and check if there is any duplicate content for that page on the web. This is a handy tool to check if anyone has copied your material.

If you want your site to rank well in the search engines, get busy writing!