Importance of Creating Content

How important is content creation?  Well there’s an old saying that “Content is King.”  Actually it’s not King or even Queen.  Nor is it a Royal Flush.  Content is the entire deck of cards.  Yep!  All fifty-two of them.  Leave just one out and you’re not playing with a full deck.  Creating content is just about the most important item on your check list of things to do when it comes to developing your website.

I have to admit that first paragraph uses a kind of “cheesy” comparison of content being a king to playing with a full deck of cards, but that really is how important content creation is.  Creating content that is relevant, purposeful, and timely will drive a customers buying process to completion.  When customers buy, you make money.  When they don’t, you stare endlessly at analytical reports wondering what went wrong.

Deliver Value and Increase Readership

At the end of the day, your one and only priority is to server your readership.  Creating content that is valuable and delivering it to your readers will keep them coming back for more.  The more they come back and trust that the content you provide them is not just one sales pitch after another, the more likely they are to be long time readers and future buyers of products that you provide.

Believe it or not, when your readers love your content, Google will find you.  Google follows people and people love to share valuable content that they find online.  As more readers share your content, Google will figure it out.  And if searchers are finding your content via search, Google knows if they’re staying on your page reading, jumping out of your site or hitting the back button on their browser and looking for content more relevant than yours.

 What can you do to enhance your reader’s experience?

First, stop worrying about Google updates like Panda, Penguin, or the next one Porcupine, if they keep naming these after animals that start with the letter ‘P’.  If you lose sleep worrying about these updates, then you’re probably just gaming the system and not creating content that is valuable anyway.  Eventually Google will figure out the scam you’ve been using and push an update out that will drop your ranking.  Then you’ll be back to square one and have to figure out a new scam to get your content noticed.

So stop writing for Google, stop the keyword stuffing, and stop alienating your readers.  If you’re creating content that ranks well, but doesn’t make sense to your readers, you will lose viewership.  Instead you should just concentrate on creating content that your readers want to read.  Start creating content by coming up with a good “Title” and “Description”, those are two key components of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that should never be wasted and will probably never go out of style.

To use another old cliché, a good title is like a “fine wine.”  Whether through a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) or a visit to your Blog, the title you create for your content is probably the first thing someone will see.  Make it intriguing and thought-provoking and you’ll capture someone’s attention.  Bore them in just a few short words and they’ll be on their way.  Regardless of what words you use, try to keep your title to 70-characters or less.  And remember this little secret, character WIDTH matters too.  Search Engines tend to truncate titles at a much lower limit when a large visible character width is used.  Create a title in all caps and far fewer letters will be displayed than if you had used proper case.

Once you have a title you like, you’ll want to spend some time on creating content for an equally compelling description, or META Description to be more exact.  Of course nothing is simple and search engines support varying description lengths.  Typically only the first 150-160 characters of the description will be displayed, however, if a search engine thinks it can display a better description of your site than the one you wrote, then it will use content from your page to create a description of it’s own.  This may or may not properly represent the content of your page, as you would like.  Therefore, take time when creating content specific to your page description, so that the description you write is the one displayed by the SERP’s.

And remember that providing value never goes out of style.  Creating content that is valuable to your readership will stand the test of time and survive any future search engine updates.

Implement an Effective Strategy for Creating Content

A strategy by definition is a plan of action.  Plans can be as simple as 1, 2, 3, or require an Einstein to figure it out.  Regardless of how complex your content creation strategy is, just make sure you do three simple things – Implement it, be Original, and be Consistent.

Consistency is a big key to being successful.  If you just write one or two articles for your blog and expect the world to find it, you’re probably not going to be too successful.  Or you’re going to be in such a small niche that the few people that do find your information, won’t be able to support the lifestyle you’re trying to establish.

Originality is also critical to your success, whether you’re creating content yourself or having someone else do it for you.  Creating quality content takes time and time is money.  Read that last sentence again, and think about it for a moment.  Should you decide to outsource your content creation, make sure you always proof the material you get back from your content provider.  It’s easy to find someone to write an article for $5, but publish it without reading it and your reputation can be damaged beyond repair.  Five dollars often gets you first grade grammar and spelling or an article that’s been spun a few times along the creation process.  There are plenty of good content creators out there.  Just make sure you test them out, review their work, keep the good ones, and quickly ditch the bad.

One last comment about originality and the Internet.  There is so much content on the Internet that you might think it’s hard to be original, but it’s not.  If you don’t like creating content and have a minimal budget, or none at all, a great way of creating content for your blog is to find guest bloggers.  Initially you may have to beg some folks to blog for you, and you may even end up borrowing content from other blogs, but just never steal content and call it your own.  Stealing content is by no means creating content.  Just don’t go down that road.

SEO Can’t hurt too much, can it?

Now that you understand the importance of creating content, delivering value to your readership, and things you can do to enhance your readers experience, lets talk SEO one last time.  The goal of a search engine is to provide the best information to its searchers, but what is “best” and how is it “really” determined?

Best for you may not be best for someone else and although being number one in the SERP’s is the best you can be, it can come at a steep price.  Focus on creating content of high quality and you’ll be fine.  Over SEO it and eventually search engines will figure it out and your rank will drop.  And how those all-powerful search engines determine the “best” today may totally change tomorrow.  Creating content and over SEO’ing it may result in a once popular article falling into oblivion after the latest “Porcupine” update gets pushed out.

Today’s secret… creating content that provides value above all else to your readers and a content creation strategy that is consistent, will lead to success in the long run.