As you get ready for the holidays and a nice four-day weekend, here’s a little something for you to digest, uh, while you’re digesting.

From the beginning of time (well, the beginning of the World Wide Web anyway), content has been declared king by SEO’s everywhere.

In the beginning of the “Content is King” movement, content development was rather crude. Throw in lots and lots of keywords whether related to your site or not, make sure you repeat every possible keyword more than everybody else, and you got ranking in the search engines.

For those that remember the dark days of search, you’ll remember that adult sites excelled at this. Search for any popular term, whether it be “cool music”, “pet adoptions”, or “shoes that make me jump higher and run faster than the other guys on my basketball team”, and about half of the top 10 results seemed to always be adult sites.

Good content becomes king

Fortunately for all of us, search engines have improved since those days. But more than the search engines changed. Webmasters began to realize that there’s more to making a sale than getting a good ranking in the search engines. So the smart ones switched strategy from writing a page of keywords crammed together to create a nonsensical webpage to writing “good” content.

Webmasters that were out to actually make money with their websites realized that their content needed to cater to their target visitor. Have a site that sells camping equipment? Maybe it would be a good idea to write about tents, hiking boots, and great places to go camping.

Sure you might not get as many visitors, but funny things start to happen when your site visitors are actually interested in what’s on your site. Your bounce rate (the number of people who leave immediately after visiting) will go way down and your conversion rate will go up. And if you do things just right, your overall sales go up as well.

Content is king?

So content is king, right? Well… no.

Content is a vitally important part of your online marketing. However, I submit that it is not king. Music is vitally important to the functioning of a dance club, but I wouldn’t say it’s the king. What is king in a dance club? How about the dancers who come for the experience?

Just like it’s the people that make the dance club worth going to, community on the Web has quickly been taking over as the king of online marketing.

Online communities have been around a long time, since pre-World Wide Web days. But there has been a huge boom over the last few years with the increasing establishment of social networking sites. This pattern confirms that people online want to spend time together. It is becoming increasingly important as each day passes for you to bring together the community of visitors that visit your site, thereby giving them a reason to continue returning to your site.

Building your very own community

So what can you do to bring together a community? To get started quickly and easily, give these a shot:

• Start a blog — Blog-o’-philes have been preaching this since the turn of the century. Two big things happen with a blog. First, you create fresh new content on a regular basis. Second, the community that comes together and meets at your blog also creates content. Content might not be king, but it is just as vital as the music at a dance club. A community is formed because of the content, but they stay because of the community.
• Implement a discussion board — Perhaps the oldest online get-together. Discussion boards have been around since long before the World Wide Web came to be. However, the WWW has allowed for major improvements on the classic discussion board. Set one up and let your community talk to each other.
• Allow user reviews of products — Studies show that consumers trust other consumers more than anything a retailer or manufacturer can say. Reviews from consumers will be the most powerful marketing content you will ever be able to put on your website.

These three items are about letting people interact with you and with each other. It makes your site a place where people can come together, talk about common interests, exchange stories, and discuss their experiences with camping equipment — or whatever it is you sell.

The content will bring the community, which will create more content, which will build your community.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 4:03 pm and is filed under SEO Marketing, Content Creation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.