Content Is King: The story of why
Hear ye! Hear ye! Content is King! Long live the King!
It’s usually one of the first 3 questions I am asked when speaking with a potential client: Can you make my site appear on page 1 of the search engine? I’ll always give a realistic answer but will ALWAYS follow it up with: As long as you have unique and valuable content, your site will rank.
Content is King
When somebody says content is king, they mean your content is the most important part of the website. ‘Content is the text, graphics, and other elements that comprise, or make up a website. Especially important is the text. Until search engines become better at indexing photos and other types of graphics (or until the full-scale release of tools such as Google’s Bard), people will search for content by prompting a search engine with text-based queries such as “graphic designer near me”.
Content is king might seem like an obvious statement, but there is a dark reason why it even exists at all. From an SEO perspective content is king because, early on, miscreants figured out a way to game search engines. It was a simple enough concept. Determine basically how a search engine works and include a response in a web page that satisfies the search engine’s request….whether that response is true or not. In other words, feed a search engine false information in order to get a page to rank.
Old search engines just weren’t very sophisticated and were easily duped.
Modern search engines are much smarter vs. 10 & 20 years ago. Instead of keywords, tags, and backlinks, Google (the world’s most popular search engine), and Yahoo, and Bing, and etc. now use ‘intelligent’ algorithms to determine the SEO value of a website. Their algorithms are driven by high-powered computers running even more intelligent algorithms. And those algorithms are changed often.
How to keep up with changing SEO practices
There are still people who try to exploit search engines through blackhat techniques and other forms of Internet trickery, but good SEO is straightforward: Follow a search engine’s webmaster guidelines, structure each page properly, and above all else – write good/original/valuable content.
Interested in further reading?
All major search engines publish webmaster guidelines. These help documents don’t explain how the search engine works, rather they outline the steps that a webmaster can take to build a website that ranks well. Google is especially verbose. See Google’s Webmaster Guidelines page.
Yahoo pretty much says the same thing regarding content. See Yahoo’s Quality Content Guidelines page.
If it needs to be said (and of course it does … for SEO purposes), Let’s Talk Graphics builds great websites! Additionally, we follow Google webmaster guidelines for all the sites we cover under an ongoing website maintenance plan. If you are interested in a well-behaved, and great-ranking website for your business, Let’s Talk!