Learn/Good-Content-Vs.-Spam

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If you are building an online business that depends on lots of content, you're probably watching as the search engines - Google, Bing, Blekko and others - declare war on spam content and content farms.

But what does that mean for small business owners trying to get more traffic to their websites? We're always told that creating good content is really important. What is good content? What's bad content? What's a content farm, anyway? And most important of all, how do you produce the good stuff, and enough of it to matter?

Good Content: Something You'd Actually Want To Read

It sounds simple: Good content conveys information that someone will find valuable, whether it's conveyed in text, graphics, video, photos, or some combination of these.

Website owners are often urged to provide "good content" containing the keywords that are important to their business. The idea is that search engines will crawl the site, include its pages in their indexes, and then include the content-filled pages in search results for keywords on those pages.

The ideal situation is when a business owner has a genuine passion and expertise in his or her field, and writes interesting small pieces on the company's website to attract and engage new and current customers. One great example is the material on this product page at Mermade Magickal Arts, displayed to the right.

Notice that there's lots of fascinating information here about the product. The text is written to entice someone to buy, and it naturally contains important keywords for this product, such as aloeswood, agarwood, incense and aroma. These words tell search engines what the page is about.

Why Good Content Is Good Business

You can make money from a website containing abundant good content in a number of ways:

• You can sell ads directly to companies whose business is related to the content on the page.
• You can host Google AdWords ads on the page.
• If your content is really good, people will want to link to it. These links can help push your site higher in search rankings, which can get you more visitors, which can get you more sales.

It's a good idea to seek out bloggers and other writers online, share your interesting material with them, and invite them to link to your pages.

What Poor Content Looks Like

If good content is useful and interesting, then poor content is just text larded with keywords, offering nothing of value to people.

A great example of this is the "article" shown at right. It's on a site about automobiles - and yes, this is the entire article. The site is clearly designed to do nothing but run ads.

This article actually does show up in searches for "get rental car while car repaired." The site owner's goal is presumably accomplished: getting eyeballs on the car rental ad that appears prominently next to the article.

If Poor Content Gets Results, Where's the Problem?

Search is supposed to help people. Returning someone a page full of results like the article pictured in the above section isn't helpful, in most cases. Pages full of less-than-useful content are appearing high in search results, crowding out more useful websites and frustrating searchers.

There's nothing wrong with building a site and running ads on it. It's a legitimate business model. But building a site that's nothing but keywords and ads won't get you any links from other sites - no one who's legitimate will want to be associated with that kind of site.

On the other hand, if you make a site that's full of great information, and that engages specific audiences, you can run ads on it and still get links from people who think what you offer is worth sharing.

People at search engines know this, and they are addressing the problem directly.

What Is a Content Farm, and Why Are They a Problem?

Content farms often commission their writers' work based on analysis of search engine queries that proponents represent as "true market demand", a feature that traditional journalism lacks.