Content is king

What exactly do we mean by content site? Surely any web site has content, or there would be nothing there?

You may have heard the old adage "Cash is king" used in the business world. The conventional wisdom is that in times of financial crisis it's better to have your money as liquid cash, rather than invested in assets that could quickly devalue or are difficult to liquidate (it has other meanings too).

However, in the brave new world of the World Wide Web (actually easier to say than www as it has less syllables) the adage is "Content is king" but what the hell are we banging on about? If you have read other sections on this site you will have noticed mentions about the importance of good content on websites. Content is what brings the visitors to your site and more importantly is what keeps them coming back, gets them to tell their friends, link to you, talk about you and as a consequence bring more visitors to your site.

SEO trickery

As part of their ways to determine what sites are useful in search results, SEs (Search Engines) use complicated algorithms that consider a number of factors. One of the factors that they look at is a site's content. How much it has, how much new content it has, how original it is, etc. The idea being to find the most relevant sites for a particular search term and return them as the results of a search.

Some unscrupulous types, always trying to stay at the top of SERPs (search engine results pages) have cottoned on to this and are churning out sites that consist entirely of poorly written, often duplicated, mostly useless content to attempt to trick the SEs. When the visitor arrives at the site they are confronted by a load of rubbish content and also a load of ads relevant to the keywords they were searching on. The idea being to drive traffic to the "content sites", then when the visitor realises there is nothing of use to them, they click on the ads and generate revenue for the "content site".

SEs think this is a very bad thing. It is considered spam. In order to deliver relevant results to the users SEs are constantly finding ways to detect this kind of trickery and exclude sites that do it from the results. Whilst some sites try to constantly stay one step ahead of the SEs in order to maintain their rankings, in the long run they will lose. The SEs are dedicated to providing useful, relevant results to their searches. That is how Google achieved their dominant position and if they wish to maintain it then they will continue to find more and more ways to sort out the www wheat from the www chaff (of which there is plenty). They have the financial and technological means a their disposal to achieve this goal.

Real content

Rather than trying going to all that effort to get traffic to a site under false pretences, why not provide a site that people will want to visit? One with genuine, original, well written content that provides value to your visitors? Surely that is the true meaning of a content site. If you are providing something of value, especially if that something is unique to your site then not only will you get visitors but they will come back and they will bring other visitors with them and some of them will click on your ads anyway, without you tricking them into visiting in the first place (you can be sure if someone was tricked into coming to your site then they're fairly unlikely to come back unless you find a new way to trick them).

Of course the real trick is providing something of use to your visitors. You're easiest option is to develop a site on a subject that you know a lot about. However, if that subject is collecting coat hangers, whist you may be an authority on that subject, you probably won't get that many visitors. On the other hand, if you are going to develop a site on a popular subject (how many sites are there on making money online?) then you are going to be competing against a lot of other sites for visitors.

Here's a site about punting in Cambridge that contains a lot of content, is well written and is about a subject that a lot of people search for. However there aren't a great deal of good websites on the subject. Yet oddly, there are no adverts on the site...

Whatever your site is about make sure that your content is well written, original, relevant and well researched. If you do that and take the correct steps to promote your site then the rest should fall into place.

Building links

Once you have built your site and written loads of good content you then need to get other people to link their sites to yours. This can be especially tricky depending on what your site is about. Link Market - Free Link Exchange, Link Swap and Link Trade Directory
Have you ever tried to exchange links, swap links, or trade links? Was it hard? Use link market instead; - it is easy to use, free and very smart. It will save you hours of work.
UK Link Exchange
Find link exchange partners within the UK. All sites are vetted for content.
We are currently testing both of the above with this site to see how good they are. The basic Link Market service is free but if you wish to get access to their premium service you have to pay. The UK Link Exchange seems to be free.

Location, location, location

Bear in mind that it is a lot easier to get a good search engine listing for a local (eg .co.uk .fr .de) site than a .com because of the way search engines work. This site, despite having very few incoming links, ranks quite high in Google for some pages, because it is a .co.uk and there are few other relevant sites in the UK for those pages (mystery shopper & medical trials). On the other hand, if this were a .com then, well, let's not talk about that.