Living Content: It’s What People Want
Most web content is barely alive, even when it is first written. It is pumped out by content mills, optimized and uploaded. This kind of bulk content is often referred to as backfill content. I prefer the term “landfill content.” Dead and rotting from day one.
In sharp contrast, living content is quality content. It is shared quickly through social media—because it is worth sharing—and takes root across the web. Better still, true living content is updated and added to on a regular basis.
Let’s look at the attributes of these two types of web content.
Defining landfill content
Landfill content is written primarily for the search engines. Working from a list of strong keywords or phrases, marketers aim to create a new page of content optimized for each phrase.
The purpose of this content is to please or mislead the search engines, and achieve a page-one position in the search results.
The focus is on volume, and not on quality.
This kind of content can achieve its purpose very well, particularly if the strategy is employed by an authority domain. The site’s historical authority lifts the landfill content pages higher in the search results.
But there is one huge downside to this approach. It’s a customer killer, and a brand killer.
When a visitor’s first experience of your website is through one of these low-quality pages, they get a very poor first impression of your site, company or organization. They won’t become customers, they won’t return to your site, and they certainly won’t share the page through Facebook or Twitter.
That’s the fundamental problem here. Bulk content is written to impress the search engines, and not your visitors.
And, as you know, only people buy. The Googlebot will never become a customer.
Read the full article @SEARCHENGINELAND.
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