All SEO work depends on a base of content
Monday, 23, Feb 2009 01:33
Gerry White and Alan Boyce
The Egyptian pyramids have stood for thousands of years, the internet for barely 20. The pyramids can teach website owners a thing or two about longevity and solidity.
Whether the internet will still be here in six thousand years is an open question, but it is nevertheless true that in building a website, a pyramid is an excellent model – and content is the foundation of that structure.
Good content is the foundations upon which all other SEO work must be overlaid. You won’t get links without good content to link to. Social media promotion needs content to be effective. Keywords need to feature in content. Any of these techniques without a base of good solid content beneath will come crashing down to earth at the speed of a banker with a handful of securitised subprime mortgages.
That’s a timely metaphor, in the aftermath of Madoff scandal and the collapse of financial institutions. The key characteristic of a pyramid scheme is that it starts at the top, with a handful of participants recruiting new members, who in turn have to recruit ever more members in exponentially expanding layers. Its top-down nature leads to inevitable collapse.
Neglect the content that is the reason why people visit your website and you are building a pyramid scheme. SEO work that is not underpinned by great content will fail. Studies show that 80 per cent of search engine use is informational. SEO work amplifies your voice when you shout "look at me!", but it you don’t have the content, you can’t answer the question, "why should I?"
The more content you have, the bigger, stronger and deeper the foundations of your edifice and the higher you can build. You have more pages to promote, more points of entry for visitors, more material to interest search engines, more opportunities to optimise to your keywords, more room to establish yourself as an authority in your area. And quality content that people will want to read will endure over time. Maybe not for thousands of years, but investment in content and SEO have been demonstrated time and again to be much more cost effective in generating traffic in the long term than spending on PPC.
The key to building something that is going to last, rather than collapse, is to start with the foundations. And content is the foundation of the SEO pyramid.
