Residual Victory Blog

Why Content is King, although not hotly debated by those who agree that Content is King, is a question that brings up speculation about the effectiveness of Google’s massive algorithms.  Particularly when search engine results still place results with keyword stuffing, link manipulation, irrelevant search engine saturation, and articles with more formatting than they do substance in the top search engine results.  To get visitors to your website, you have to manipulate your content to satisfy Google’s excessive qualifications and the customer’s preferences, which might be contradictory.  In addition, Content is not King if it exists without functionality and easy navigation.  Your Content can be the King of the Universe, and maybe show up in first page search engine results, but without an effective web site design, or not having what the customer wants, your customer will be leaving faster than they came in and - Click - your Content may be a prince, but your Content is not King.

Content, defined as many have, as simply written material (copy) is not King.  Content, as the whole substantive part of your website is certainly King.  In order for Content to be King, it has to go beyond articles and blogs.  It has to anticipate the customer’s wants and needs.  Now that Google has implemented their universal search, your webpage is under some more stiff competition.  However, it has opened huge doors that lead to pathways of marketing opportunities.  Videos, images, news, maps, books and websites are no longer specialty requests by the search engine user, they are inclusive in all search engine results, pushing and shoving their way into the top.  Google’s aim with the Universal Search was to “deliver a truly comprehensive search experience.”  Which translates into your website having a truly revamping experience.  If you don’t have all forms of media integrated into your website you could very well be left behind.  Add content and not just copy.

Engaging the reader should perhaps be King, because Content is created to Engage the reader.  However, the Reader is engaged by Content - and that makes Content the King to get the reader.  Which came first the chicken or the egg?  But doesn’t engaging the readers also include sales and marketing tactics such as branding strategies and opportunities for reward or pleasure?  Do these necessarily contain good content? Look at Amazon.com and Ebay.com - their content is great because it gives the customer what they are looking for - it’s not necessarily full of information, and I haven’t investigated their foray into the world of blogging, forums and social networking, however I’d guess they only need that for support, because their websites give the customer everything they want.

The Content is King mantra needs to step down and make Customer the King.  The Customer is and always has been King. Even if you have great content, your Customer is only going to buy or do what they want.  You have to anticipate their needs, and for now, Google’s needs.  Engaging a customer won’t work without a customer, and content won’t work without a customer, and your website won’t work without a customer.  Anticipate your customers needs, meet your customers needs, keep up with the times, and make your Customer King.  How do you do that?  By anticipating your customer’s needs and making your Content King of course!

King Good Content Serves his Kingdom

Why Content is King, although hotly debated, is easy to answer.  It’s because a King serves his Kingdom.  On the web, there are many Kings, and many Kingdoms.
Your Content is the King - trying to reach the people to bring into his Kingdom.  Your Content is the gold and the riches, the food and nourishment, and the promises that the people desire.  But the Content can’t reach all of the people at once, even those whose greatest fantasy is to spend time in Content’s beautiful surroundings.  There are Kings clamoring everywhere for people to come visit their Kingdom.  But the people can’t see through the smoke and the fire created by the fiercest, most terrifying, most barbaric fire-breathing dragon of them all - the gigantic Green Google.

King Content is a courageous King.  He decides he has to kill the evil Green Google.  But the dragon is too big, and King Content is a vegetarian, and concerned about global warming.  He can’t displease his people or they will never enter his kingdom.  So King Content decided to tame the Green Google.  He knew he had to use respectfulness, gentleness, and firmness.

King Content approached the Green Google through a forum to find out what the Green Google needed to by happy.  The evil Green Google was leery at first, believing that the Content was just out to deceive him.  But as the King developed a relationship with the dragon through a social networking community, he started to realize Google wanted to give people the results they were searching for, just as Content did!  After many chat sessions and blog posts, the dragon and King Content came up with a plan to get people the results they wanted.

Green Google agreed not to pollute the air or give a need to go searching for  fire engines - if the Good Content Kings could help make the Bad Content Kings go away.  The Good Content King agreed to let the dragon bring people from far away kingdoms.  The dragon couldn’t talk to the people easily because he was always full of hot air, but he could carry them to Good Content.  Sometimes on the way to Good Content, Bad Content hijacked the dragon, snatching people away from their results.  Sometimes the people jumped off early and went to King Bad Content, just because he was closer.  So the Green Google developed mysterious algorithms to keep the Bad Content from keeping the people away from the Good Content.

King Content and Green Google worked closely together for years. The people who found Good Content were so happy they decided to stay in his networked palace and visit his webpage everyday to explore the riches they had found.  Through word of mouth and tagging, people learned who the Bad Content was, and went straight to visit Good Content.  There was hardly any more searching for engines, because the fire and smoke had cleared and the Green Google had wore down a path so people could find what they were looking for.

The people looking at Good Content shouted “Content is King! Content is King!”  At night, everyone turned on their networked computers that the riches had provided them, and looked in awe at all the webpages that Content had created.  The links were full of everything they had ever searched for; dynamic content, functional parts, easy navigation and personalized pages with all of their latest interests.  Bad content had disappeared, and the Green Google was evil no more.  People loved the Good Content, who was King, and everyone in the virtual kingdom lived happily ever after.

Unique Content is a powerful tool for establishing your website within the dominions of search engine rankings.  Unique content turns your website from being one in a million to being the one and only.  Instead of a customer clicking through millions of sites just to find you, you are brought to them.  That’s the power of unique content.  Unique content is value over rankings. Your unique content is created by knowing your customer, your niche, your products and services, and presenting a carefully crafted presentation worthy of a split second click.  That split second click has the potential to bring with it a lifelong dedicated customer. 

Spend the time and effort analyzing your business against the competition.  What makes you unique?  Who is your target market?  What are they looking for?  Do you have it?  Let’s say you sell wine.  Many stores sell wine.  If you type wine into Google you will not only first get a link to wine.com (not a surprise), but you will get Wine magazines, software programs named Wine, guides to wineries and articles on wine.  One person searching for wine may be looking for the history of wine or an antique wine bottle, not buying a bottle of wine.  Another person has a dinner for eight to prepare.  She knows what she wants.  She types in “good red wine” or  “Cabernet Sauvignon.”  If your strategy is based on unique content, and you have carefully constructed your phrases and pages to indicate your specialties and your competitors have not, you will be at that woman’s front door with several bottles of wine.  This gives you the opportunity to introduce other products and services you offer that might be of interest to her.  Then it is up to you to follow your customer fulfillment strategy to make sure the customer goes directly to your website the next time she needs wine instead of hitting up the search engines. 

The editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, developed a concept called the “Long Tail” theory that is applied to analyzing keywords for content.  This theory is comprised of the philosophy that Internet searches are advancing from mainstream searches to niche searches, and unique content will be paramount to website success.  Instead of seeing many hits for a few words at the top of keyword charts, the primary keywords will decrease in hits, and the “tail” of the keyword charts will grow with more “niche” related keywords.  Niche searches bring the right customer to the right business.

Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but the trend has already started.  The School of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University in an article by Bernard J. Jansen and Amanda Spink entitled  “How are we searching the World Wide Web?  A Comparison of Nine Search Engine Transaction Logs” cites a study that showed “the researchers report that 38% of all queries contained only one term and that most queries are unique.”  That study was completed in 2003.  Unique content is going to have a weightier effect in the future on search engine rankings.  Spend the time analyzing your website for optimal ranking in search engines now.