The Optimizer - Weekly SEO News

It's a maxim as old as the art: "Content is King." Well, brace yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, because there's been a shakeup in the Kingdom. Let's talk about the deposed ruler for a moment.

Content has been royalty from the first days of SEO, when the sum total of the science was fitting the right keywords to your page and hoping for the best. The end user could pretty much fend for him- or herself, take what the engines put at the top and be happy with it or keep scrolling.

Over time, we learned the hard way what advertising and marketing geniuses had known for decades: it isn't the fisherman with the quickest wrist that gets the bites, it's the one with the best bait. Getting your link to the top of the hits is great, but unless your visitor sees something there he likes, and plenty of it, that click doesn't mean much.

So we got the message... and got it, and got it some more. Right? Well, here it is again: a recent study by OPA and Nielsen/NetRatings shows that content-based sites still draw the most attention:

• Content - 49.6%
• Communications - 32%
• Commerce - 13.8%
• Search - 4.5%

The numbers seem to reinforce Content's claim to the throne, but let's not go back to bowing down just yet, because those numbers don't tell the whole story. While the increased power and presence of blogs and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook has driven the growth of online readership, online commerce has actually decreased 2% from a year ago.

And let's consider that while reading content -- well, good content, at least -- is time consuming, the goal of online marketers is to do all they can to decrease the distance between Point A - the page hit - and Point B - the sale. Compare the average social networking site user profile, between two and four minutes of reading, to the average few seconds worth of reading time for a product blurb on an ecommerce site.

So if Content has lost its grip on the ecommerce throne, let's look at Community for a moment. Many vendors have wisely adopted the strategies of building fan communities, forums and blogs. By creating an environment where consumers can interact with the company and fellow consumers of that company on a more personal level, ecommerce providers can build brand recognition and customer loyalty, a combination that thoroughly unseats Content as King and leaves Community at the top of the heap.

Labels: community