SEO is Key to a successful web site and Content is KING. No amount of back-links, rankings, blog posts, forum posts and article writting will help if your site has no content. Now, both written and rich media are both indexed as equals. However, without good solid concise written content (words), your site will be overlooked. If you offer a genuine product or service that you want people to find, then you have to "inform" them with lots of information and it needs to be indexed by the search engines.

TheScoopGroop SEO Advice: Content

There are a ton of sites and blogs dedicated to the topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimazation) and they all have great advice as well as ways to help. There are lots of "steps" to success and many of them should be followed. There are a lot of companies, like in the millions, that decide to put up a web site for a variety of reasons. Sell something, tell something about their busines or to generate leads. They all have the same expectation. The web site should WORK for them or it's pointless.

Work or to be successful means a lot of different things depending on your goals and needs. I'd propose that 90% or more of all web sites put up by small to medium sized business all expect the same thing, to be found. Otherwise it's useless and a pointless excercise or project.

There are a lot of arguments, philosophies and ideas on what it takes to move up in the ranks of search engines, especially Google, the grand-daddy of all search engines. Many of them are not wrong or in combination, they all work together. There’s even discussions and miss-guided information on what “Ranking” even means. To the lay-business man, it usually means, showing up in the search results window at Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Truthfully, being on top of search results is actually a bit complicated and means a lot of different things. However, the bottom line is relevancy and accuracy. How many times have you typed in a set of words in a search field only to be presented with a bunch of “similar” stuff, but NOT what you were looking for? Unfortunately, a lot of companies out the hock their wares and services on the web to anyone and any audience playing the “numbers” game. They may or may not even offer a solution or product in a given subject, but they vie for those people searching similar stuff on the “hopes” that they settle or accidently find themselves on their site and buy.

Frankly, what a waste of time.

Why not have “real” information and “real” needs presented to your potential customers? It’s actually not hard to do as Google is pretty good at supplying “relevant” information to the searcher. However, it does take a bit of work along with care and feeding a site to get it in good position to be presented to the millions of searchers out there AND to get those results presented at or near the top of the results pages.

There is a pretty basic and easy formula that you can take to get your site found. It’s called information and more than a few bullets on a page. It’s also referred to as “content” or paragraphs of relevant information about your product or service. Google, Yahoo and MSN indexes this information and if someone searches for specific terms that are related to your site, the search engines happily presents it to the end user.

While it sounds “simple” it does take a bit of work. First, you have to write copy or information about your company or web site. While writing about yourself or your company, you have to balance the information with relevant terms that you expect people to search for. Some times those terms are a bit fractured or not coherent, so it takes a bit of word-smithing to get it right.

If you can’t write, at least put together some relatively simple information about your product or service and have someone you know do the writing. Sit down with a good word processor and just start typing about everything you know about your service or products. Usually many of us have family or friends that are “decent” writers and would be willing to proof-read or rework the information for you.

Alternatively, there are a ton of free content sites around the web that may already have content or articles related to your informational needs. You can search these sites and with very little work can publish them on your own site where appropriate. These are great options for filling in the gaps if you’re not a prolific writer or short on time.

Bottom line is this. Content or words and paragraphs of information on your website about your products or services carries a lot more weight with the search engines than pictures and graphics.

There are many strategies to setting up a web site and the old adage, “Content is King” still holds true. Placing good useful information on your website will allow it to properly work for you. That’s the ultimate goal with any website and your business presence on the web. Let it work for you.