Q: Is Content King?
A: Content Is King Only When It Is Truly Noble

Content is king, content is king, content is king ... you hear it all the time, everywhere. Going into the second half of the first decade of the 21st Century it's become a mantra chanted by web developers and search-engine optimizers in the native tongue of every country with i-net connectivity.

For content to be king it must not only be of value to site visitors, it must have a positive effect on search-engine ranking bots.

But does all that repetition make it true? There was, after all, a time when the entire population of the earth went around chanting (or at least thinking) that the world was flat.

The simple answer is "yes," some content is king, some is important but not kingly, some is irrelevant, and some pretends to the throne and does more harm to websites than good.

To understand this, we need to understand what content is. Content is everything on your website. It is, for example, the information on your "Contact Us" page - name, phone number, email address, etc. Contact information is a perfect example of content that is important - crucially important, obviously - but not kingly.

Other examples of content that's important without being royalty include pictures and design elements. Important because many products cannot be sold without showing the potential buyer what they look like and because most intelligent consumers are turned off by poorly designed, ugly websites. But not kingly, because for content to be king it must not only be of value to site visitors, it must have a positive effect on search-engine ranking bots.

Which brings us to words. When most web geeks, including us, say "content is king" we aren't really referring to the big, wide world of pictures, banners, flash effects, Java applets, and audio/video feeds. What we're really talking about are words - known in the trade as copy. (One of the real mysteries of this whole subject is where the phrase "content is king" came from, when it should have been "copy is king" right from the start.)

The reason copy, not content, is king is because search-engine web crawlers like Googlebot don't factor photos, graphics, special effects or Flash into their calculations. They only consider words (both visible and meta), domain host (bad or good neighborhood), links (relevant or irrelevant) and similar textually based site attributes.

Given that SE crawlers have never considered things like graphics in the past, why is the copy (i.e. the words) on your website "king" now when it wasn't five or eight years ago? Because search bots have gotten better, faster and, if not more "intelligent," definitely more literate.

First- and second-generation ranking algorithms essentially considered the words visible on a web page as a reflection of the title and keywords hidden in the HTML code. If the page's title in the source code was "Widget World" and the hidden page description was "The web's widest selection of widgets from around the globe" and the visible text didn't contain the words "widget" or "world" the search bot tossed a red flag and down rated the site.

The reason copy, not content, is king is because search-engine web crawlers like Googlebot don't factor photos, graphics, special effects or Flash into their calculations.

That is, to be sure, a very simplistic explanation, but it's basically true. It's also 180-degrees different from what happens now.

Today major search-engine ranking programs actually analyze your copy's content. Is it relevant to the purpose of your site? Do your keywords appear often enough or are they over-saturated? Is the content fresh or stale? How often do you update or add to it? Is it solely yours or has Googlebot and its cousins employed by other search engines seen it - or electronically "twisted" variations of it -- on ten, 100 or 1,000 other sites?

If your copy - your words - are pertinent to the products and services you offer, if it is properly seeded with search terms and keywords, if it is regularly expanded, if it is expertly written and uniquely yours, it could very well be the kingpin of a significant rise in your site's page rank and return position.

Of all the above factors, "expertly written and uniquely yours" is the most critical because if the content is not expertly written and unique it could, instead of being a king, turn into a knave that has what doctors call a "paradoxical reaction." To put that into plain-speak, copy that is non-relevant, over-stuffed with keywords and not unique to your site could hurt your search-engine optimization efforts rather than help them.

Of all these "no-nos," the most serious is using canned copy that has been resold to numerous sites. Google defines such duplicate copy as "substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar." Note especially the last two words, "appreciably similar." Appreciably similar is the ground twaddle that comes out of the computerized word grinders called "twisters." If Google and the other major SEs catch you using twisted copy - and their algorithms are getting better and better at it - your site could lose PR or even be sandboxed.

Fortunately, it doesn't take a 350,000-word novel to satisfy the engines' thirst for new, pertinent copy. The important thing is not the number of words, but their relevancy and uniqueness. Let's say you operate an online florist or nursery supply company. Well written 100- or 200-word factoids about seasonal buds and plants posted to your site every couple of months are relevant, timely and - assuming you write them yourself or hire a reputable copywriting service like a GetWebContent.com to write them exclusively for you - unique.

Copy that is non-relevant, over-stuffed with keywords and not unique to your site could hurt your search-engine optimization efforts rather than help them..

Such blurbs meet all the requirements for valuable new web content that is both search-engine friendly and of interest to end users, as do even shorter taglines, photo captions, or alternate text attached to graphic images (SE bots read text related to artwork, they just don't look at the pictures.)

To repeat, the key thing is what the words say, not how many of them there are.

Here's two ten-word examples (the mythical website operator is an optometrist in Spokane, Washington.) A: The time in Spokane is 11 a.m., temperature is 58.

B: Spokane area's only provider of advanced computerized Optomap eye examinations.

Two sentences, ten words each. Which is more likely to earn our fictional eye doctor a bonus point or two from Google? The first sentence is generic. The second is on topic, an optometry site talking about eye examinations. It has a crucial search term "Optomap" and it is obviously unique content - since no other optometrist in the area has invested in an Optomap Retinal Imager, no one else can be making this claim on their website.

At least one web marketing expert advises her clients to get a written guarantee that "all content is unique, not scraped or republished " before hiring a third-party content provider.

At GetWebContent.com, where content truly is king, all we do is generate unique copy written especially to your specifications by full-time professional copywriters with Fortune 500 corporate and ad agency experience.

And we will gladly guarantee that in writing.