There is a famous saying "Content is king" and with websites content means words in quality AND quantity.

After you have had a beautiful website designed, which you believe deserves to framed in the national gallery and features more cunning, fancy widgets and dongles than you can poke a stick at, just stop and consider what is going to bring people to your site and engage them properly once they arrive.

Content, information - words and pictures. And by far the most important of these is words, commonly referred to as copy or content and when we're talking websites these days we're also talking blogging. Search engines don't care a lot about pictures and pretty much ignore technical widgets, layout is irrelevant and your beautiful colour scheme is invisible. What you need are words. Search engines need to read words and people need to read words. The power and sophistication of words as a communication medium remains totally unchallenged. Think about it, how many movies without dialogue have you enjoyed? Twitter is nothing BUT words! Because of this copywriting content can be broken down into two purposes:

Search engines

Try this: go to Google, search for anything at all and click on the link below each result called “Cached” (this a copy of the website Google has kept). Along the top of the page look for a link called Text-only Version. This is what Google sees and what is it ? Yes words!

Now that we realize the importance of words, how should we pick those words? First they need to be unique. Search engines are very good at knowing detecting unique content. By unique content I mean copy that exists nowhere else. Many websites which appear to contain a great deal of copy actually are only repeating content available somewhere else on the internet. If someone tells you they can give you hundreds of pages of content, check that it will be unique. We all know how easy it is the copy and paste. If your content is a copy of other content existing anywhere else on the internet (including books, academic papers etc), your version will be compared to the original and unless your website is deemed to be the more important (authoritative) source, it will either be devalued to have little importance, ignored, or worse treated as suspicious and possibly spam, leading to your site being penalised. Let's face it, it's hard enough to get strong rankings when you are doing everything right so being penalised in ranking results is disastrous.

The other biggie is relevance. This refers to how relevant a search engine believes your content might be to searchers query. For example when someone types red socks into a search engine, the search engine will think about all of the times it has seen content with the key words “red socks” mentioned. If your website mentions red socks, your site will be placed somewhere in the rankings. Your site has been found to be relevant but whether your website is mentioned at number 1 of a search engine results page (SERP) or number 12,398,333 depends on how the search engine ranks your site on hundreds of other often secret criteria. The most important of these is the quality and quantity of your content, how many other websites link to you and the amount of traffic your site gets.

By far the most direct and effective method to control this result is through the quality and quantity of your content. Size does matter, more words are better but the words need to be unique. Bigger sites rank better and big sites with heaps of unique content ranks very very well. Another factor is freshness. Search engines have pride, they want their customers to be happy and come back again and again. All things being equal if two sites have the same amount of quality content the newer content will get a better ranking, after all people do tend to want the latest and greatest.

Now all of these priorities for the user and for the search engine must be combined as high quality search engine content may bring the visitor via a search but only human quality content will hold the attention of the visitor and help to achieve the gaol you have in mind be it a purchase, a subscription or just plain getting your message across.

At Websitesneversleep we write content, we specialise in words, words, words and we love the internet. If you're interested in great descriptive content or informative and fun blogging, we can help. If you want your website to be effective, get in touch !