from the desk of . . . Ken Nadreau

It’s what oils the wheels of the Great Internet Machine and keeps people coming back for more. But what exactly constitutes “good content”? Does it always have to teach something new? Need it impart great beams of wisdom? Does length matter? Number of words?

Every SEO master, expert marketer, writer, and critic will tell you, content is everything. It doesn’t matter how snazzy your site looks, or how much you’ve paid to have it made. As long as its optimized to get traffic, you’ve got that part covered.

In fact, there are methods readily available now that can get a simple blog or web page optimized, indexed and listed on Google in under an hour. Doesn’t have to be special. Just a simple, single page will do. Beautiful or butt ugly, it doesn’t matter.

So its not about that at all.

It’s about what happens after that traffic clicks on your site link and settles in that’ll determine if you traffic stays or goes off to parts unknown. And that, my friend, is all about words, not the look and feel, words.

Good, solid content turns visitors into readers, readers into buyers, fans, followers, or what have you. It doesn’t have to be enlightening, or unlock hidden mysteries, and in some cases it doesn’t even have to be grammatically correct or perfectly formatted. Though it always helps in keeping a mind trained to it if its spell checked and well structured.

Good Content is the key, and that means just two things . . .

1. Is your content what your visitors clicked to see?

If you search for the key phrase “massage therapy” and found a link for that exact phrase match, what would you expect to find? Content about car repair? Dog grooming?

No, you’d expect to find an entire site dedicated to massage therapy, right?

Every post, article, advertisement, and reference on that site should be about the key phrase you searched for. It doesn’t necessarily have to have the “wow factor,” but it definitely should be completely about the topic you want.

That’s the first part of having good content. We’ll call it The Expectation Element.

2. Is your content informative?

Again, that doesn’t mean imparting a brand new revelation at every turn. But what it does mean is your content should provide information someone else can use. Lets go back to “massage therapy” . . .

Ask yourself what sort of information you’d expect to find on a site about massage therapy. Techniques? The best massaging oils to use? Information about the best quality massage tables? How to start a massage therapy practice in your home?

Sure! All those things would be informative material you’d expect to find. And no doubt you could think of even more.

Perhaps a personal experience story. Your first time getting a massage, or a paraphrase of a story you read somewhere.

This is all good stuff you’d want on your blog or site, which we’ll call The Satisfaction Element.

Now you’d probably think there’s a lot more to it, but really, all you need is to give people what they’d expect, and satisfy that expectation, and you’re providing Good Content.

Remember these two elements, Expectation and Satisfaction and you’ll never go wrong. You can write long articles, or short two or three paragraph ones, but as long as you provide the elements, you’ll do just fine.

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