Quality Content: It’s Not Just A Good Idea—It’s The Law!
Posted by Beth Hrusch on Fri, Feb 18, 2011
I
nternet marketing and e-commerce are becoming increasingly content-driven. The information that people get from a site will make or break sales and leads. This means that businesses need to become serious about establishing a content marketing plan. If you own a business and are marketing online, the content that you produce should be a top priority.
Quality content is now pretty much the law. Undoubtedly following our lead, Google, Blekko and other search engines have officially recognized content as a major factor in page rankings. Recently, Google announced that it is committed to rewarding good content and reducing spam. Its new algorithm, in fact, is designed to ensure that high-quality sites (and their high-quality content) get priority treatment.
Other measures are being enacted by search engines to start weeding out bad content. Blekko is even banning some low-quality sites from its search portal, and Bing is working on stricter quality controls for web content.
Even if you aren’t worried about being banned by search engines, you should be aware of these developments in the world of online marketing, because they do affect how well your site performs. Do you have in place a strategy for creating and distributing high-quality content on the Web? If not, then your site could be under-performing, and much of your marketing effort and resources are possibly being wasted.
Investing in a content development strategy makes sense for business. There are different ways to go about it, but here are a few tips:
1. Determine your goals and objectives, and decide on timelines.
2. Choose what forms that your content will take i.e. blogs, articles, press releases, ebooks, etc.
3. Work with experienced SEO content marketing writers to develop the content and schedule launch date(s).
4. Distribute the content on social media, social bookmarking sites, your site, the company blog, etc.
5. Track results.
There are many resources available to you if you need some guidance on how to produce quality content.
In an increasingly competitive online marketplace, quality content is becoming a necessity. With little initial investment, any business can set up a content plan that includes useful information for consumers. Odds are very good that your competitors are already developing a content strategy and if so, it’s giving them the edge in your niche. It’s only a matter of time before they are the sites that potential customers find when searching for your keywords.
Is quality content a good idea? For sure. Is it the law? Not yet, but it soon will be. Just as soon as the Internet police catch up with the offenders and bring them to justice.