The Importance of Original and Quality Website Content

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How important is it to have original and quality content on every page of your website? In my opinion, this is the single most important aspect of Search Engine Optimization and website conversion. Let’s face it, if you own a website, then targeted traffic is what your main goal is, or should be. I am going to address this issue in two sections: Search Engine Optimization and Landing Page Conversion.

Search Engine Optimization

In case you haven’t yet noticed, Google recently removed the Supplemental Results tag from their search results for websites using the site: operator. When this was still being used, it was a useful tool used by many webmasters to identify and fix problems with their website. I’ve seen alot of complaints about this recent move by Google, so maybe they will bring it back. If not, it will be more important than ever to make sure that before you put a webpage online verify that all the text on that page is different from other pages in your website. This does not only apply to your main content area, but also your sidebars and footers. This is especially difficult with Content Management Systems such as Wordpress and Joomla. You should have only one HTML navigation system on your webpage or if you like to use two, have one set of links at the top or on one of the columns (i.e. Home, Products, Services, Contact Us) and your less viewed informational links in your footer (i.e. Privacy, TOS, Sitemap). If you use Flash for your navigation, then it is acceptable to also have this in HTML in your footer.

I recently was asked to analyze a website that has original, informative content in his main content area, yet in his left and right columns the same advertising and promotional text was used as “fillers” on every page of his site. As a result, most of those pages have dropped out of Google’s main search index and his only recourse as I see it  is to replace the duplicate content with original, relevant content, rename those pages, do a Redirect 410 to the old pages, and then wait and hope they will be indexed and become ranked.

From the search engine point of view, it is much better to have 5-10 pages of original, relevant content than 200-1000 pages of repeated content. In the case of the latter, the majority of those pages will be removed from the main index and probably will not generate much traffic.

Landing Page Conversion

A visitor to your website does not want to read the same information over and over again. With each click of the mouse, the visitor wants new and unique information about your website: what you sell, where you are located, and why he should choose you over the rest of your competetion. If he sees the same information over and over again with each click of his mouse, you are wasting his time and yours. Chances are the visitor will just move on and find what he is looking for elsewhere. You’ve just lost a lead!

If you write clear, original content on your webpage, optimize it well for the search engine, and people can find you for that information through a search engine, they might just click to other pages of your website. Maybe they will even find their way to your order or contact page. Remember the Kevin Costner movie from several years back. A very true phrase was coined “Built it and they will come.” But, you have to build it right or they may never return.

Technorati Tags: Community, content management systems, duplicate content, google, original quality content, Redirect 410, repeated content, Search Engine Marketing, search engine optimization, search engine optimization, Webmasters Resources

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