The Value of Content Production/Writing

Creating Text for Online Publishing Drives Traffic

There is a general rule of thumb that internet marketers and web designers live by: content is king. In the modern era of search engine marketing, nothing delivers more bang for your buck than original, useful, and engaging content. While Web 2.0 design standards emphasize clean and flowing graphics, the motor running everything is content.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines explicitly state, “Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.” Content, in other words, is a top priority in terms of what a search engine looks for when they visit your site.

Content, of course, comes in many different varieties. There is actual static page content. This is the information that is relatively stable on your website and which is fairly easily indexed. There is also what we call articles which frequently come in the form of blog posts. In terms of maximizing your internet marketing, I have found that a site must strike a balance between stable content and dynamic content. To a search engine, this shows that a site is consistent and stable, yet continuously adding content and improving its engagement.

For content to be most effective, however, it has to be optimized. This means including all your standard SEO code techniques and making sure page titles and headers are included. Additionally, the art of content production is about targeting a handful of keywords for which you are optimizing.

Content does no good, however, unless people actively read it and respond to it. This is why the other half of content production is content publishing. We have a list of sites that are great for publishing your blog (some automatically updated with a blog feed). There are also a handful of article publishing websites that we utilize. The point of all that is to distribute the content and extend your authorship to sites that you wouldn’t normally publish.

Furthermore, producing content does you no good if the content is of a poor quality. As a general rule of thumb, any piece of content should be at least 400 words, should not be keyword heavy (3-5% is the recommended figure), and should be produced primarily for, and this may seem odd to some, humans not the search engines.

For your website to be optimally indexed, then, it needs a vast amount of quality content. Frankly, the more content the better as it should foster users going deeper into your site and staying for greater periods of time. While design gets all the attention, remember that your site is nothing unless it has readable content.