If you are anything like me, you are addicted to the deep well of information that is the internet. You have probably included a few phrases into your regular vocabulary such as, “I’ll Google that later,” or “Well, the Internet says…” Why do people look online for their information today rather than using the routes to information that we used to use? In times past, if you wanted to know, say, the difference between an Arctic fox and a red fox, you’d go to the library and look in the encyclopedia. If the encyclopedia wasn’t as full of information as you’d like, you’d go to the card catalogue or (more recently) use a computerized search for books that had to do with foxes and then use the Dewey Decimal System to locate those books within the library. Then take those books, check them out, and read them, hoping that somewhere in the books was the information you were looking for all along.

Do you see any problems with the old system? Well, you probably got the information you were looking for, but who knows how old that information is? Maybe scientists had made discoveries with the DNA of both types of foxes to realize that they are, in fact, related, and not separate species? Or maybe the arctic fox is more related to wolves. Maybe one or the other is no longer facing extinction, and your book was printed ten or more years ago. Also, maybe you weren’t the first to want information on foxes. Are you going to wait two weeks to for the books to come back in so you can read about them? Are you going to visit other libraries? If you have a time limit, like, say, a report due in two weeks, then you don’t have the option of waiting for your book to come back. You could try asking someone who knows a lot about foxes, but if you live in Florida, what are the chances of running into an Alaskan fox trapper on the street?

When the internet was first reaching popularity, teachers told students that they would not accept papers written using the internet as a source. The reason? “Anybody can post anything on the internet”. At the time, when trust was low, that was completely valid. Now, teachers are allowing students to harvest their data from the internet, but most still require at least one library find. A problem we’re seeing now, however, is that a lot of students are plagerizing work directly from Wikipedia and printing it as their own work.

But what does this have to do with content? We’re getting to that.

The internet is so full of information, that it’s easy to forget that you need to write your own information if you’re planning on selling products online. But simply think about it - what are people doing online? Most of them are looking for information. This is still the information age. Say a person is looking for product reviews on a few different cell phones they’re thinking about buying. The best way to offer the information is to have all the specifications of each phone listed out in an easy to read format, and then offer the product reviews. Smart websites also have a compare feature, which lists out the various aspects of what a phone can do in a chart and lists each model and you can easily figure out what phone offers the features you want and their relative costs. Doesn’t that sound useful? Wouldn’t you want to re-visit that page later for reference if someone asked you about phones or why you chose the phone you did choose? If the page was kept up to date, technophiles would frequent that page rather often, checking new features and new phones. If that same page also sold phones, they’d have a nice captive audience to sell them to. Why would people buy from them versus another website that might have lower prices? Trust. If someone trusts your information, they also trust that you’re not going to rip them off with whatever you’re selling. Buying a product over the internet requires a lot of trust. Trusting that the website company is going to be there next week and next month and next year will go a long way towards trusting that the company will take your money and give you the product you want in a timely manner, and a website company that has taken the time to put together that kind of comprehensive information is less likely to disappear overnight.

Building trust with your customers and providing useful information should be the main reason you put content on a website, but now I’m going to tell you of a few more reasons to do so.

How do people gain link popularity? Reciprocal linking? Paid links? Those do work, to varying degrees, and there are certain advantages, such as getting to choose your link’s anchor text and where exactly it points to, but building links on your own in that manner is a long and labor intensive process. If you spent half that time on building out your content into something people would want to use and refer to later, you could very easily get links from all over the web from people who appreciate the work you’ve put in to your website content.  (You will hear this kind of quality content that people find on their own and want to link to referred to as “link bait”)

The disadvantage is that people could, possibly, work to link to your site using words or phrases you don’t want to be associated with, like “scam artist” or “miserable failure“. These kinds of pranks are unlikely, however, requiring hundreds of thousands of links from people of many different IP addresses to acheive, and Google claims that it can’t happen anymore due to a change in their algorythms. The only change in algorythm that would make sense to prevent that kind of Google prank would be for the search engines to verify that the keywords you are getting links from happen to also be somewhere on the content of your site, and bonus if the keywords are on the page that the link is pointing to. (thus, another reason why it’s such a good idea to build out your content.)

The best kind of links come from sites that have a high amount of authority, and it’s difficult to get links from sites like that even if your site has something of value to offer (like comprehensive comparison charts for cell phones). It’s next to impossible to get links from authority sites if you have a site with next to no good information on it. If you were an authority site, and people came to your site trusting you to have great information and links to other sites that have fantastic information, you would be very picky about what sites you would link to. If you started linking willy-nilly, you would lose a lot of trust from your regular patrons, and your site would start to lose value. These are the things that authority sites think about, and this is why it’s so difficult to get links from sites like these.

Have I convinced you yet of the importance of valuable information being presented as content on your website?

Here are a few phrases I hear quite often:

“I don’t have time to write all that!” or “I’m not a writer!” or “I don’t actually know anything about my products other than what came in the sample sales text when I signed up to be a reseller…”

If you really don’t have time or can’t, you’ll need to hire someone to write things for you. If you can’t find someone who’s already an expert on whatever products you are offering, you will need to find someone willing to research your products for you, looking up all the information and constructing a bunch of valuable text. Just ignoring the issue of relevant content won’t help your site at all. Constructing a website that has no content is just like building a car with rusty razorblades for seats. The car works but why on earth would anyone ever get in it?

What challenges have you faced when it comes to content writing?

Back in 1994, when the internet was young and search engines were new, the developers working for the search engines were trying to figure out an easy way to help their “bots” spider the web and index pages found on the web. They petitioned for “meta tags” to be accepted, and people started adding them to their websites.

The point of meta tags was that it was something you could add to your site that summarized your site without having to have it showing for the viewer. They were supposed to act like a card catalogue at the library in that they provide a good method of locating the information you are seeking.

This was a great idea, and webmasters around the world started adding keywords and descriptions to their web pages. Very soon, however, people noticed that their sites would get indexed depending on how many keywords they had in their meta tags, and how often they were repeated, thus, if your entire description, title and keyword tag was just “shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes…” etc, then you should rightly get placed on top of the search engines for the term “shoes”. Another thing people were doing, was adding terms in their keyword tag that had nothing to do with their site at all. They would notice that a lot of people would type in “sex” as a search term, and so stuff their keyword and description metas with that - even though they might be selling only shoes. The thought process was to try to trick the user into clicking on your website.

Obviously, if you’re looking for something specific, and you end up on a page that has nothing to do with what you were looking for, you’re going to be pretty angry. It seems like a rediculous strategy now, but we’ve grown up as a society online quite a bit since then.

Why would they do that? Well, the mentality grew from a few concepts. The idea is, if you get a million visitors, and 1% of them convert into a sale, then you’re making 10,000 sales. It also stemmed from the food court in the mall concept. You have an almost captive audience. They’re already in the mall, probably not done shopping, so they’ll want to come over and spend money on your food selections as well as being in the mall for whatever they’re looking for.

There are some problems with these outdated ideas. Generally, if you’re looking for something online, you are only annoyed by not finding exactly what you’re looking for. The mid-90s idea of “surfing the web” is all but dead. This is 2008. You want to know election predictions? Go online. You want to know what the weather’s going to be like today? Go online. Better yet? Google it.

So. By 1998, search engine companies were phasing out the use of the keyword meta as far as a classification of a a site. Google, reportedly, has never used the keyword meta for anything at all. The meta description is used by many search engines (including Google) as the display description in your listing. In other words, while it does not show up on your site, it does show on the search engine display, and is usually the determining factor on whether or not someone will actually click on your link. So, the description tag is very important, but only for conversion, and not for rankings.

Without using the much-abused keyword tag, how are search engines deciding what your site is about?

They look at your site’s content, for one. If your site is about shoes, then you would want to have text descriptions about your shoes. Since this is what search engines now read, it’s tempting to stuff it full of keywords, but remember that we’ve all grown up, and keyword stuffing is now considered an offense by most of the major search engines.

Something rather striking today, however, is the fact that Yahoo seems to have started supporting the keyword tag again. This is one of the reasons why Yahoo’s search results are actually different from Google’s. This means you can’t actually leave your meta keywords off your website. Yahoo itself recommends that you only add keywords that actually pertain to the page they are located on, and to not put a blanket set of keywords that affect every page of your site. Is this a revival of the keyword tag? We’ll see. It’s definitely not got much weight as far as determining what the site is about, however.

Today, we use the page Title, meta Description and meta Keywords. The page Title is still considered one of the best resources for telling the search engines what your site is about. The meta Description should be thoughtfully laid out as a lure for people making searches online for your keywords. The meta Keywords should only reflect the keywords you actually have listed on the page. You can use them as a reminder of what keywords to use when writing content for your page.

It is important to have your metas laid out correctly, even though they don’t carry much weight at the moment. They are used by search engines for various applications, and thus that makes it worthwhile to make sure they’re up to date and customized. However, it is not advised to work solely on your meta tags and nothing else. That is a surefire way to see your site’s rankings never move. There a lot of other tricks to use when working on website rankings. More on that later.

This week, Mobile Penguins was proud to move to our new location in Redmond, Washington. We are now located in a brand new office building that has a LEED Certified Green Interior, and has calculated the carbon footprint down to each individual office. We are very excited to join in the journey toward sustainability, and are pleased to show the world that even penguins can be green!