Everyone who owns a computer and uses it to access the Internet, will know the all too familiar sense of despair  that assails us the moment we begin a keyword search. Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner  we must admit to frustration arising from useless plentitude on the information highway.  A keyword search will throw up millions of documents that contain the keyword, but not even one gives us the relevant information!

Why is that so?  This is a legacy of a period when webmasters keen to get their websites listed into search engines threw commonsense out of the window and just included meta tags that contained all the keywords in their html pages., so that they get listed on search result pages.  They had a one point agenda–to get high ranking on a search engine result page, so that they could get the customer to the website and sell their product !  Unfortunately, they ignored the crying need to actually include information about the product in the context of the keywords.  They talked about their company, the CEO and then listed out the products manufactured by the company without a single word about why a customer should buy their product over that of the competition or what are the significant features of their products in layman terms!  A few posted pictures of the products (as if the website was part of their display window) relating to the keywords with little or no information about them.   You see, alt tags are crawled by web spiders for listing relevant pages!   A smarter breed of websmasters, just filled their webpages with lists of the keywords repeated endlessly! Of course, this is ignoring the scores of websites that buy the top space in search engine results for a price!  So, browsing these pages  for information was, and still is,  a very frustrating exercise.

It is in this scenario that a content rich website that actually informs the visitor about the products, comes as a pleasant surprise. Recent studies on browsing habits of visitors to websites indicate that visitors tend to spend more time on websites that provide detailed information on a product.  They tend to revisit the site several times and also refer others to the site.  Such readers also navigate to the sites of the competition only if the latter provides comparable information.  So if your site provides only pictures and feature lists, it is quite likely that your visitor will leave your pages quickly and  permanently.

Search engines too, have become wise to this fact.  Modern search engines use sophisticated algorithms to track quality of content on websites, the relevance to keywords listed in the meta tags vis a vis the content and the relevance of the pictures to the meta tags and so on.   You will find that sites that were listed number one on search engines in the past, have slid down the rows and are now listed somewhere deep inside the search result pages.  This is to the advantage of readers, who prowl the net for all kinds of information.

It follows, that the “survival of the fittest” in the context of websites today, is a matter of hosting plentitude of informative content.  The better the quality of content, the better the possibility of converting a casual visitor into a lead and a lead into a sale!  So, if you are a websmaster and are competing for attention with thousands and millions of competitors across the globe, have a relook at what you have to offer to your cyber customers! Your business could depend on it!