Content is King

Surely a beautiful website designed by very talented graphic designers is the way to attract new visitors to your website? You might be surprised to read that this is not always the case.

Before we face the wrath of graphic designers everywhere (some of which are valued friends!), a wonderful graphic designer is extremely important, and it’s essential that customers can navigate your site easily and comfortably. It’s also great publicity to be nominated for and receive awards for a well designed site. BUT! None of those things cut the mustard with search engines. What’s the point of having a pretty website if no one can find it?

Google’s algorithms aren’t able to see if a website looks good and therefore poor content will affect your ranking. As Google says itself, giving visitors high quality content, especially on your homepage “is the single most important thing to do.”

Google advises writing pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic and to think about the words that users might type in to find your pages and to incorporate those words into your content. The advice that content should be well written should not be taken lightly. You can’t just fill your pages up with lists of keywords or spam up your content with keywords just for the sake of it. Google algorithms are too clever for that and you run the risk of being penalised for this, or at worst being banned from their indexes.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Google’s crawlers do not recognise text contained in graphics. By all means include beautiful and relevant images on your site, but don’t think that you can fill images up with keywords to avoid having to spoil your pages with text, as it won’t achieve anything.

It’s also important that you keep the information updated regularly. Not just to please the algorithm gods, but also to keep your visitors engaged in the long term. Google pays attention to regularly updated content and rewards accordingly. But also, visitors will keep coming back to see what’s changed, whether it’s because they value your blogs or to see if you have new products or services.

You can write content for your site yourself, it’s not rocket science. If you’re confident that you can produce high quality, unique, engaging content then go right ahead and do just that with the support of your web designer. However, there are plenty of specialist writers out there who have lots of experience in writing quality website content that you can work with. Discuss it with your web designer; they may employ or contract their own content writer who can work with you as part of your web design package. Alternatively, they are likely to be able to recommend freelance writers that they have confidence in to do a good job.

So, the phrase ‘content is king’ is not a glib statement, it’s an essential part of producing your website. Design is important, but it’s content that will keep your visitors coming back for more.