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Content Writing

What is Web Content?

Web content is a universal term that includes any kind of information presented via the Internet.  Web content can be videos, pictures, text, audio, or other.  Generally, though, the term “web content” refers to text-based content.

Web content is more than just print articles posted online.  Good web content is aware of the demands from search engines for certain things like keywords and links.

For instance, while New York Times Online displays articles on the web, it is well-known for not paying much attention to SEO concerns.  This article, “Craig (of the List) Looks Beyond the Web” does not even take into consideration basic ideas such as have a keyword-rich title tag.  Yet, because of the huge quantity of links pouring into NY Times Online, they still get very high rankings.

But for the ordinary online marketer not blessed with NY Times Online’s high rankings, web content must have certain elements:

  • Sparse style – easier to read.
  • Keywords are important – but style is not a slave to keywords.
  • High word count is valued.
  • Written for humans – but still is search engine-friendly.
  • Internal links referring to other parts of the site.
  • External links to relevant sites.
  • Good, keyword-rich anchor text.

Quality Web Content:  The End Game

Utter the words “quality web content” and you’re apt to get sneers and chuckles from people in the online marketing business.  “Quality” and “web content” just don’t seem to go together.  It’s an oxymoron.

When I began writing web content, I hammered the stuff out to fill space.  It’s the web, I thought.  It’s called content.  They don’t even call it writing or words…it’s just content.

When you’ve got an empty space–a bowl, a room, a cup–you fill that open space with content.  It’s web filler.  It’s stuff.

And I proceeded that way for some time.

A History of Changes

Search engines are always changing the game.  You think you’ve got it mastered, and next week they change the algorithm and your rankings get shot down.

It’s always a new initiative they take on.  Looking at pay-per-click is probably the best way to see how these trends will play out, because PPC is what the search engines really care about.  PPC is the money-maker.  They take special care with this aspect of their business.

So one day it’s all about ad copy being relevant to keywords.  And then it’s about thin affiliates.  And then it’s about landing page quality.  And then it’s about another thing, until you’re about ready to quit the game.

Garbage Out, Quality In

I never thought I would be saying this, but in the next few years the new initiative that the search engines intend to take on will be better literary quality in web content.

Already, they promote that idea by favoring the traditional news outlets and corporate mouthpieces–and the default thinking here is that these sources contain better writing because they pay more handsomely for it.  Or maybe I should just say, “pay, period.”

How do you judge quality when the content does not have the imprimatur of cnn.com or nytimes.com affixed to it?  Can a whatever dot com site get high marks, too?

Algorithm-Mandated Quality

The biggest question is, “How do you judge quality?”  Humans have a hard enough time doing it; how can a search engine do it?

Already, the SE’s use external aspects as a judge:  length, number of links, bulleting, keywords.  But as we all know, none of those things really determine quality.

Latent Semantic Indexing is a start.