Content is King! Have you heard that saying yet? Search engine experts are practically using it as a mantra. What does it mean and why is it true?

In the context of websites and search engines, when experts say that content is king, they mean that building additional pages of text is one of the best things you can do to improve your search engine rankings and number of visitors. Anyone that has attended any of my classes or asked me to work on their internet marketing has heard me include this in my recommendations. In fact, I tell everyone that search engine optimization (SEO) basically comes down to three factors: On-page factors, linking, and content. Most people generally think of the first two when trying to rank better.

So why is content so important?

For starters, search engines don't rank websites, they rank web pages.

Read that sentence again and think about it for a moment. What it means is that the more pages you make on your site, the more chances you have of any of those pages ranking better. To start with, it's simply a law of averages. To illustrate, if you want to win a raffle, you might buy more tickets. The more opportunities you have, the higher probability of coming out on top. Of course, this is over-simplifying a little. After all, you can buy a whole lot of lottery tickets (which I don't recommend) and will still typically lose the lottery.

To increase your chances, each page of content should center around a keyword phrase or two. Use that phrase several times within the text. Use it in the Title tag and in a heading or two. Now repeat that process over and over again. Make a page of content every day if at all possible. If not, make one per week. This is work that will definitely pay off over time.

As a side-benefit, content can also be distributed to other sites and newsletters. Put a nice bio about yourself and a link to your website at the bottom, and you are on your way to gaining traffic and growing links. Another nice side-benefit is that if your content is good, others will link to you. And we all know how important inbound linking is to search engines.

So what exactly is content? What pages of content could you make for your site? We'll discuss this in a future newsletter.