what content is and why it matters
The sum of the information you offer on your website is your site's “content”, or “web content”, as they call it. That includes text, image, sound, everything. Despite what many uninitiated people think, content is what really matters, not design (you don't go to Google or Yahoo for their design, do you?).
The content is crucial for the success of your web site for two main reasons:
- it tells your site visitors about who you are. Poor, outdated, badly written information makes them leave and never come back;
- if you want to rank well in search engines you need a content-rich web site, with regular updates. And the content should be original. Ask any good SEO specialist. That's because:
- good content will attract attention, inbound links and other referrals. Over time the accumulation of those will make a huge difference, as this type of “natural” referral is more genuine, diverse, robust and long-lasting. That's what search engines appreciate;
- people search for a huge variety of words in all sorts of combinations. The more text you have, the more chances that some particular phrase will match the exact phrase someone is searching for;
- many pages equals many internal links, which means better popularity for each individual page;
- some search engines also place importance on quantity — they assume that a large website has had more effort put into development and is more likely to be high quality, so it should rank higher.
Both quality and quantity matter. The more of each you can get, the better. It's just that adding original content to your website on regular basis is an extremely time consuming operation that requires special skills and dedication. Sounds like a nice candidate for outsourcing, doesn't it? :)