What is Content?
Content is everything that is on your website or in your emails such as words, images, audio and video.
For example, the content of this website includes all the words defined in the Internet Marketing Dictionary as well as the graphics, articles on the site, links to other pages and sites etc.
A rich content site is one that provides a lot of information of value, whether this is words, sounds or video. A poor content site is one that either doesn’t contain much or contains information that is incorrect or very low level.
Search engines tend to like high or rich content sites because they deliver the information that users are searching for. For this reason, a good long-term search engine optimisation strategy is to build rich content sites often focused round a particular niche topic. This site is an example.
Whilst some website owners like to create their own content, others rely substantially on content provided by other people. Webmasters can do this in several ways. For example, site owners may buy in content from Private Label Rights sites or copy articles from article directories. More recently sites, and especially blogging sites, have started to use user generated content to build out content. Any comments added to a blog by its readers contribute to the overall quantity of content, if not its overall quality. Indeed the process of using user contributions to add to sites is now known as Web 2.0 and websites like Facebook and YouTube are substantially driven by user content.
In addition, tools have been developed to generate content automatically. For example, you can use RSS feeds to generate self-updating content on a site or you can use article spinning software that takes one article and turns it into lots of similar articles by replacing words with synonyms etc.
From a search engine’s perspective the rapid growth of online content means that the job of keeping up to date with everything online is becoming harder both in terms of making sure that all new content is accessible via search but also, just as importantly, it is becoming more and more important to be able to work out what is good quality content and what is just low level filler that doesn’t really provide the reader with any information of value.