Writing Content for Websites - A Thankless Job!

Suddenly, everybody wants to write content - write good content - for better search engine ranking. Not just content – you must update your websites regularly. Because Google says so! For the sake of AdSense, everybody is busy in content development. But how to write content and wherefrom to get content?

Has anyone ever bothered to check what the millions of those web pages waiting behind the top five or ten (if one has patience to go that far) contain? I am certainly not surprised if I find a page ‘under construction’ on the first page of search results. Not because the search keyword is ‘construction’ but because a synonym or a co-occurrence term like ‘building’ is the keyword. No matter what you do with the content, there are going to be millions and millions of web pages for any search term and the count is bound to increase further. If your web page is to be visible among the top few search results, there is no other option but to rely on ‘niche’ keywords or key phrases or the so-called ‘long-tail keywords’.

With the increase in the number of keywords put in the search box, web traffic comes down. If your website does not appear in the top three results where almost 70 % of the total traffic is believed to be hidden, matters could be worse. The serious ones decide to write and write like nobody’s business. Thus, you have articles like ‘Why I love bananas?’ and also ‘Why I do not hate bananas?’ from the same writer. And writing has increased - tremendously so. Because we are told by the SEO gurus that one of the ways to get traffic to your website is not only by writing a blog but also keeping it updated with links pointing to your website. But how to get traffic to the blog? So you have to write even more and submit to ezines. The same article is submitted to hundreds of article directories to get back-links and some traffic too.

The wiser ones prefer to avoid this free method because it involves a lot of time and time is money. Instead they spend money in the form of pay per click (PPC) advertising to be visible. In this circus, ultimately, someone else walks away with the booty! This, I believe, defeats the very objective of content development. Come what may, search engines are never going to find good content. No page can ever be checked by a human, nor it is possible when you deal with megatons of pages. My apologies to the semantic indexing experts – your endeavors are remarkable, but you can only find related pages not good content. Good content becomes known by reference. Moreover, it is not content but ‘information’ that people search for on the internet. And if the searcher comes across the information he was digging for, he is blessed. For me, content is just filler in the ‘form’ and pure rubbish.

Unfortunately, most people have given up serious study of books and journals. Most of our information now comes from the internet itself. Crazy it may sound but information breeds information – nay, content - to expand the search results. If any information exists, it is to be purchased. I believe it is hidden till you buy but our search engines seem to discover it too and place these pages on the top page of search results. The spiders and crawlers are worth an award for being mercilessly exploited and abused. Writing content, surely, is a thankless job!