Content is king!
That was the clarion call in the Internet world in the late ‘90’s. Many people scoffed, as it created huge bloated sites with little direction and awful business plans. Most of them failed.
Unfortunately there was a backlash against this ‘Net truism. There are some voices today trying to help us understand that it is still about the content.
A user comes to your site to fill a need. Period. It’s the content of the site that helps them accomplish that. Yes, the navigation and search and other tools help them, but only to get to the content they need.
Nick Usborne writes about this in a recent issue of Excessive Voice (“Your Own Content Epiphany”) by addressing the obsession by so many to optimize their sites for search engines:
”...they obsess over keywords. They worry about the words being read by the Googlebot…If the Googlebot could speak, here is what I think it might say to techno-centric site designers, marketers and SEO experts: ‘Dude, you’re getting it all wrong. The only reason I sniff out all those keywords, links and blocks of content is to find pages that PEOPLE want to read. You know, those people who could be your readers and customers. Don’t write for me, write for THEM.’”
How true. (Aside…how long will it be until the Googlebot really CAN talk?!)
Usborne closes with this advice: “Help your readers by writing well. Be helpful. Be clear. Be genuine. And write as if you are writing to a human reader – you are.”
Amen.