The importance of "CONTENT" in Search Engine Optimisation, SEO

If you are trying to do your research on SEO, you bound to read "NICHE CONTENT", "CONTENT IS THE KING", "KEEP FOCUSING ON CONTENT", "CONTENT IS EVERYTHING" and similar phrases. Most often you find "CONTENT" listed as the top most important SEO tip.

Why content is important? Straight forward answer is "that is what the potential reader is looking for". 

So it is critical the content of the blog / web page is to have quality and usefulness.  Quality in term of content itself and the presentation. 

Let's say you have a wonderful content, good. But do you know how many others have a web site / blog with same content. May run into thousands. This is where the NICHE word comes into play. Almost every SEO advise will tell you to have niche content.

What happens if what you know, what you passion about, what you want to share with others is not NICHE. This is the most likely scenario.  In this scenario SEO is become critical. You have to make sure you are ahead of the pack. 

Let's say your content is NICHE. NICHE in what sense. There is a danger of having NICHE content very few people interested. For example you write about a festival of one community. Most likely only that community is interested in that Festival.

The true NICHE content should attract beyond geographical borders.  For examples a common issue but very little written about, a type of disease and very little written about it. In this scenario you will good traffic (assuming your site/page is indexed by search engine).

Now start to think about your content, it's organization and presentation. 

What is SEO and why SEO?

You must have heard it, seen some advertisement, read in forums  and so on. But what SEO stands for?

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

So it is the methods, tricks, strategies, and ......

Now you have question in your mind, "WHY ON THE EARTH I SHOULD OPTIMIZE FOR SEARCH ENGINE".

The answer is simple. Ask yourself a question "why do I write blog or create website? The answer is for people around the world to see / read. 

Yes, but it is likely that there are millions of blogs / websites dealing with the same subject. How do the potential reader knows that you have a site that deals with a subject which is of an interest to he or she. 

Most of the time your potential reader is going to "SEARCH" for the information. How do he/she search? Use search engines. Using keyword or keyword phrases.  And there are many search engines around. But we all know the dominant one is Google and may be followed by Yahoo. 

Let say your potential reader use search engine and still cannot find your site, then your site "does not exist". You site is not visible.

One more important point to note: Most people trend to stay with the first page of the search results. 

Simply put you should optimize the site or blog such a way, when a relevant keyword is searched, your site should be in the first page (top 10). SEO encompass the actions required to achieve that.

Lets not forget about the money involved. Let say you are (i bet you are or will be) using adSense or other advertisement oriented services to make money through your site. Then you want high traffic to your site. SEO is critical to bring traffic to your site (not necessarily mean more money). 

That's all on the definition why you need to do SEO.



Links:

There is nice write up about search engines, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine