Qualities of Good Content

In 1996, Bill Gates made a prediction about the future of the Internet in an essay. In it, he asserted that content, more than any other media, would be where the real market on the Internet would be. As many Internet marketers know, today, more than ever, Bill Gates’ prophesy, which was embodied in the title of his essay, couldn’t have been more true: Content is King.

Contemporary search engines, which are often the starting point for most people’s day-to-day online experiences, rely on content to process queries and return meaningful results to users. As a result, putting the right content on a website often forms the bulk of the work needed for search engine optimization, the process of improving the ranking of websites on search engines for specific keywords. On the other hand, the wrong content can send a website plummeting on results pages.

This, then, begs the question, if content is king, what qualities are important to making sure that content does what it’s supposed to do, which is help a website rank higher on search engines?

To answer that question, one has to turn to the search engines themselves, and overwhelmingly, they have asserted the same answer throughout the years:

1. Content needs to be of a high quality. It has to be thick and information-rich.
2. Releases of content need to be regular. Despite this, the quality of the content should be consistent.
3. The content needs to align with the message of the brand.