How large content websites work

Most business Web sites are not very large. After you get past the basic brochure content you may find some case studies, press releases, and personal profiles for executives and then the average business site runs out of steam.

eCommerce sites, science fiction fan sites, history resource sites, and AdSpam sites tend to grow to gargantuan dimensions. So do active Web forums, but many Web forums are created to complement static content sites.

Large content Websites work on different levels. For example, they naturally chase the long tail of search and attract significant untargeted traffic. It is certainly possible to plan out a large content site that specifically targets multiple keywords. News sites do this by celebrity name, television show name, and other similar topics that draw active fan bases. Financial information sites may similarly target specific keywords in volume by profile profiles for publicly traded companies, mutual funds, etc.

The travel, auto, hospitality, real estate, dental, and medical industries have spawned many geolocation sites that use state and city names, country and city names, or other combinations to target local search keywords in volume. These templated sites rely on volume replication of boilerplate text with keyword injection for most of their search visibility. That’s an efficient way to produce content but it leaves a site vulnerable to targeted specialization, which does actually happen in the competitive marketplace.

In an ideal situation, you want to chase the long tail of search with targeted optimization. That is, you want the pages you optimize for specific keywords to have sufficient, unique, robust content to draw in a lot of relevant, related traffic for which you don’t optimize. You don’t accomplish that with boilerplate text and keyword injection. Unfortunately, many AdSpammers have resorted to hiring low-cost article writers to fill out their sites, but to achieve those low costs you have to go offshore.

There are very competent writers living and working in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and other sources of low-cost writing. However, these writers use their native idioms in their articles. For optimal search performance, your idiom (the expressions you use) must match the idiom of your search audience. For example, I write “optimization” because I live in the United States, but were I in the United Kingdom I would be “optimising” instead. Most people realize these differences exist and the search engines compensate for them.

Consider the following text (which I lifted from another SEO Website — I have no knowledge of the experience or competence of that company’s employees and do not in any way intend this citation to express an opinion about their ability to provide SEO services):

…[Company Name] full SEO services company strategies and organic SEO practices helps hundreds of customer across various industries in getting high place in search engine results which increase traffic, enhance web visibility, branding and increase in sales and profits.

There is not much text in that snippet that will help this company rank well for competitive queries in the U.S. SEO market. Now, if they are not offering their services to American customers, I suppose that’s okay. But if this is the quality of the writing you place on a Web site that is directed at the American consumer, you’re not optimizing for search because you’re not using the expressions that Americans typically use for search.

The problem rises up in many languages, not just English. Spanish Web sites use different idiom around the world. You’ll find Spanish-language sites from Spain, Mexico, most countries in South America, the Philippines, and the United States. If you hire a low-cost writer from Honduras to write the copy for a Web site that targets Madrid clientele, you’re not likely to have copy that works well for the Madrid searchers. Yes, you can edit the copy, but what if you’re publishing 1,000 articles per month?

Large content Websites grow large quickly and they don’t stop growing. You can count on volume to bring in some long tail traffic but you’re not optimizing for the long tail when you publish inappropriately written copy on your site. Even science fiction fan sites are expected to use specific expressions (and/or to be able to explain them correctly to novice visitors). Reference sites such as IMDB, Wikipedia, and online dictionaries and encyclopedias lack many jargon explanations or scatter them inefficiently across their content instead of embedding contextual explanations (in order to save space, a factor that decreases content value).

Generally speaking, any time-saving, effort-saving, efficient activity lowers the value of the content you create. If you require your visitors to click through hyperlinks to read explanations for all the technical terms, if you simply don’t edit the jargon and just leave it where contributors put it, or if you edit the jargon out of your content, you’re not communicating with a jargon-aware or jargon-seeking audience in the way they want to communicate. People who encounter jargon that intrigues them go looking for explanations of the jargon. People who encounter jargon that requires their additional effort to find out what it means tend to just give up and find something else to read.

Giving up may be as simple as clicking on an ad or closing a browser window. When the visitor closes the browser window, everyone loses: you for lack of conversion, the visitor for lack of satisfaction, and the search engine for poor user experience. Even the ad click doesn’t guarantee that visitor will want to come back and click on more of your ads. AdSpam sites can be well done or poorly done. The well done sites are the ones for which the most thought and effort have been invested.

Large content Websites work best when every page is treated with the love and care that pages on a small content sites are given. In a Web forum, you need to make sure every discussion is reviewed by a moderator, not with an eye toward editing the content but with an eye toward maintaining the standards of the forum. In a social media site, every submission should be reviewed to ensure it meets the quality standards set by the site’s criteria for inclusion. In a large article archive, every article SHOULD be reviewed and/or edited (if allowed) in order to ensure that a minimum standard of quality, thoroughness, and authoritativeness is maintained.

Diversification, quality, and efficiency don’t work against each other. You can standardize page structures without relying on extensive boilerplate replication. You can target large volumes of keywords without sacrificing long tail search referral opportunities. You can reduce the amount of time you spend developing copy without sacrificing editorial standards.

But when you sacrifice the time you should be spending on any of these critical areas you underoptimize your site. You sacrifice some of the potential search gains you could have aimed for by literally writing them away. You overniche yourself, underreach your potential market, and literally box yourself into very small query spaces.

The irony of focusing on small query spaces with large content sites should not escape anyone’s notice. If you set out to create a well-optimized large site, your goal must include touching as many active query spaces as possible. That includes the unknowable number of query spaces you don’t have time or resources to identify and target keywords for. Once you create that wall between your site and the long tail, you make it immensely difficult to build your search traffic efficiently.

In effect, the efficiencies you achieve in creating your content reduce the efficiencies you could achieve in building your search referral traffic. Generally speaking, the less efficient your content creation process is, the more efficient your search optimization becomes.