Everyone has heard the mantra “Content is King” enough times that they now want to vomit.
Or is that just me?
The reality is that you do need content for many reasons, first and foremost being that without content your visitor has no reason to be at your site.
Content from an indexability standpoint has and is largely a text based entity.
However, with the growth of semantic tagging, the power of social news, and other social media rich concepts, the power of non-text based content has grown.
Images, video, and widgets are now heavy hitters in the content game, and can drive enough anchor text rich links to your site to make text rich content an after thought. However you must be savvy when utilziing these items.
Don’t leave the power of this content up to your visitor.
Put the tags in their mind by tagging the item first. Create strong titles for the files and pages that these items rest that leave little error in how people approach linking to and tagging the content. If your initiative is focused on a certain social media platform add the buttons related to the medium on the page.
The game has changed, and it has opened the playing field for those of different talents.
Use this information properly and you could see a strong benefit from your “content” in 2009.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Dave
Great Points. Content is more than just the text, it’s also what you do with it. With so many rich media indexes beginning to get some actual relevance of results it is ever more important to know what terms will be the best for things like alt tags. Organizing these with your content is key to pulling it all together and making your optimization hum like a well tuned engine.
That article woke me up a bit! I’d been feeling uneasy over diminished importance I place on graphics and video in my SEO efforts and now you’ve helped me realise I need to pay more attention to non-text content for my franchise business web site.
Thanks