ON JANUARY 3, 1996 Bill Gates released an essay entitled Content is King. If you have been considering building a website or improving your website or SEO, you’ve probably come across this now famous quote, “Content is King”. Most of us have but what have we done about it?
For well over three years, I looked for a way to have a good website. A website that actually represented our business. I paid hard earned money to a few different website companies, experts in their field, to get a couple of crappy websites built and then for only a couple of thousand a month, “they” would provide SEO. The results were a disaster and I’ll bet many of you had and still have the same crappy results with your website and optimization.
Today, we’ll focus on the Website itself. Let’s start with what Bill Gates said, not what your current website builder, host, and SEO computer website expert dude that sucks money off of you monthly says.
Here are a few highlights from the Essay by Bill Gates, Content is King.
When it comes to an interactive network such as the Internet, the definition of “content” becomes very wide.
The broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.
One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of a photocopier. It allows material to be duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of the audience.
The Internet also allows information to be distributed worldwide at basically zero marginal cost to the publisher. Opportunities are remarkable!
If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letter-to-the-editor pages of print magazines.
Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products, a marketplace of content.
Ok, if that’s true, here it is 22 years later, how good is your content? I’ll bet like mine was, it’s not very good!
Take a look at your website. I’ll bet it’s stuffed with “keywords” that are duplicated over and over. It’s optimized, “they” say. Yeah, right! Can a potential new customer actually look at your website and see that you are different from your competition? Probably not and if not, and if your company is selected, you most likely will be selected nine times out of ten because of price, right?
If Content is King, how good is your content?