As a partner and project manager for Mandatek, I meet with a lot of companies and individuals who are looking to have us build a new website or revise an existing website. Most of the time, the clients are more focused on the design of the site rather than the site’s content. Unfortunately, if the client wants the site to be found, which I always assume to be the case, then emphasizing design over content is the wrong way to go. Now, Mandatek has a fantastic design team, and we can make a website look very nice. And before anyone starts arguing with me, I will admit that design is an integral component of a successful website. However, without meaningful content, no one is going to find that beautiful site.
Search Engines are Brainless, Content-Eating Bots
People forget that Search Engine bots aren’t really alive. They aren’t even really “engines”. Very simply put, they are just a clever set of algorithms that gobble words and spit them back out into categories. They’re blind and dumb and hungry for content. If your website has very little content, then, well, they are just going to move on to the next website that has more content to eat.
Search Engines Don’t See Design
Search engines can’t “see” very well. They don’t really see images (except the tags and file names associated with them) or Flash or JavaScript, so beautiful or cool designs appeal only to humans, not search engines. Awesome designs don’t help your site get indexed or found. Just look at Craigslist for an example of this concept.
Search Engines Like Fresh Content
Although hungry, search engines are actually picky about the content they eat. They don’t like old or expired content; rather, they look for the fresh stuff. A website needs to be updated on a regular basis with new content. Adding a blog, RSS feeds, events, articles, and links to other websites (both in and out) are all ways to add fresh content. And, of course, linking to social media accounts in sites such as Twitter, Facebook and the like are also vitally important. I advise clients to have their website built with a CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress so that they can make periodic content changes fairly quickly and easily.
Don’t Feed the Bots
Design is important. But your website must contain keyword-rich, relevant, fresh content, and lots of it. Otherwise those brainless, hungry search engines bots will just go somewhere else.
-Michele Rempel, Mandatek
I like it!
All things being equal, Content prevails!