All Hail Content! - Search Engines Need Content, Too
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You might be thinking at this point that I’m aiming this article only at those who do e-commerce on their website. Well, guess what? If you’re not selling anything, content is even more important, because it’s all you have to attract your visitors. Trust me, they aren’t coming to your site to check out your ads! You still want your visitors to do something when they come to your site, whether it’s signing up for a newsletter, creating an account, posting on your forums, reading an article, or whatever. The only way they know who and what you are is by the content you show them.
Sure, when you have a website focused on e-commerce, a sale is a “conversion.” But if you have a site that’s not specifically selling anything, something like signing up for a newsletter counts as a conversion, too. And the only way you’re going to get those conversions, again, is to make your visitor comfortable…and the only way you can do that is with content.
Now that you know your flesh-and-blood visitors (whether they’re “customers” or not) need content, how about the ones that aren’t anything more than software? Yes, I mean the search engines. It may be a little more difficult to think like a search engine than a customer, but it can be done. The goal of a search engine spider is actually very similar to the goal of a person; it’s looking for information. The difference is that it’s not looking for specific information for the same reasons. It’s trying to classify your site so that, when a visitor to the search engine puts in keywords, they’ll see links to the websites that are most relevant to their search.
To some degree, you may have to blind yourself a bit to “see” like a search engine spider. It can’t see any graphical elements. All a spider can see is text. That means if you expect to rank at all in the search engines, you’d better have relevant text.
Let me say a word to the technically savvy folks out there who know how to do certain kinds of redirection: don’t even think of it. Yes, there is a black hat SEO trick that lets you direct regular visitors to one page and serve up a completely different page to search engine spiders. That will get you banned from the search engines, and you don’t want that. Even being a major company won’t protect you from that, as you can see from this article here. Don’t fake content; just sit down and write the real thing.
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