Content content content
I’ve preached the need to have a good selection of keywords often enough for you to be sick of it by now. I’ve mentioned content a time or two. Now it’s time to get down and dirty with content.
Content is KING . . . yaay!
From a strict point of view, a web page is made up entirely of content. That is, everything that is visible from the ‘view source’ tab is content.
From a webmaster point of view, content includes the meta tags, the title and description, and the portion between the <body> </body> tags. There could be content in the footer, but we’ll pretend that there isn’t.
Generally tho, the content we refer to is that which is between the body tags. That is the content we will be discussing here today. To relieve some of the pressure, we will dismiss the possibility of images and javascript being part of our content, even though those are important pieces of some puzzles. I’ll also disregard the navigation portion of the page and the linkage and anchor text.
Since I’m a resident of the U.S., I will be using only English for my discussion. The Brits will be quick to tell you that I don’t have a clue what real English is. I think I agree with that. I only know what I have learned. You are likely in the same boat.
Our content is made up of words. Words strung together to express concepts, ask questions, and so forth. Our English words are made up of letters of the alphabet. There are only 26 of them. Five vowels and 21 consonants. Except that it might be six vowels and 20 consonants depending on how you treat the ‘y’.
Our words are grouped together to form phrases. Phrases grouped together to form sentences and sentences grouped to form paragraphs. A few paragraphs together makes up a page.
Our mission as blackhat marketers is to produce content that will fool the search engine algos into believing that we actually know something. Produce same quickly and (preferably) automatically. Bonus points given if it actually reads well enough to pass a cursory manual inspection.
The very best content is hand written by someone who knows a subject very well indeed. Very best content is difficult to scale, and takes a lot of time.
Good content comes in several flavors and is found in several places on the web. Good content can include hand written content by someone who does not know the subject so well, but has researched enough to make some sense.
Good content includes articles by others, entries in a wiki, entries in an encyclopedia or dictionary, books, magazines, and other publications. Good content could be transcriptions from audio media, translations of foreign language items, and many others.
Good content can be scaled. Good content can be discovered, stored, manipulated, transformed, and republished in many different forms. Good content, and an off-shoot that I call ‘good enough’ content, is what works best for me. Well, in a blackhat sense. (I do a little mango-tango in the wh market now and then.)
The KING is dead . . . long live words
A quick and dirty search on the web indicates that there are about 995,112 words in the English language{1}. That number is suspect for many reasons, but it gives us some place to start.
Here is a little something to think about{2}:
New words are constantly being invented, developed from existing words, or adopted from other languages. Most will be used rarely, or only by a small group of people. Hence an unlimited number of words may occur in speech and writing which will never be recorded in even the largest dictionary.
And, this little item may require head scratching{3}:
…..what exactly is a word? Clearly we should include single units such as cat and dog. But are the plurals cats and dogs separate words? Should we include compounds such as walking stick, which are made up of two existing words? What about abbreviations like BBC and Dr, which may be freely formed in limitless combinations: are they words? What about proper names?
So we have a whole bunch of potential words to work with. Some of the words are very common, some are so rare that they prolly wouldn’t be recognized as English words anyhow. Some are only a single letter, some are like alphabet soup. What shall we do with them?
I know, let’s put them on our web pages and make money. Part two coming soon.
~dink
- - - - - - - - - -
Notes:
{3}Sketchengine
Comment by Aaron Wakling
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Aaron Wakling
Comment by Dink
Right on Nick. Didn’t mean for it to sound like seo in the sidebars or use of images was not good. Only trying to stay within the ‘content’ area.
**edit**
Now where in the cornbread hell did your comment go? fishing gremlins.