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There are a lot of people who think that online content exists purely as a means to attract traffic to a website. An awful lot of people. In fact, I'll go one further and suggest most people. You only need to type a phrase into your search engine of choice and browse the first few websites that feature in the search results to notice that a great deal of what passes for content is simply keyword-stuffed waffle. It isn't there for your benefit. It exists purely to satisfy Google and its mysterious algorithm. A couple of sentences of this drivel is about as much as you can stand and off you click to another website, hoping for something a little more useful, a little more intelligible, a little more human. This is known (by me at least) as The Curse of the Googlecentric Webmaster. These Googlecentric Webmasters are locked in an eternal struggle with Google and its algorithm, desperately battling for supremacy. It's a fight the webmasters have absolutely no hope of winning. Google has them utterly outclassed. The most they can expect to achieve is a depressing pyrrhic victory: yes, they get the traffic but at the expense of the customer experience. How can they possibly expect to grow their customer base when their content in no way caters for their customers, when their content gives nothing to their customers? The secret of creating really great content is to forget about Google entirely. That's right, I said it. Forget about Google. Pretend it doesn't exist at all. Just focus on creating a website that gives your customers precisely what they're looking for, and lots of it. To help you, I've devised an easy to remember three-letter acronym: APE. APE stands for 'Amusing, Practical and Enlightening', and you should be aiming for one or more of these characteristics when creating all your web content. It's important to remember that the great majority of people perusing the internet at any given moment are not looking to buy a product or pay for a service; in fact, they don't want to engage in any form of cash transaction whatsoever. They want to be entertained, they want assistance with a problem or they're seeking information. In other words, they want to be Amused, offered Practical assistance or Enlightened. APE. Content that passes the APE test will always give your customers a good experience. And customers who have a good experience are not only likely to purchase your products or pay for your services, they're also apt to return to your website. But, even more significantly, they may very well tweet or blog about your website and recommend it to others. That's right, free marketing. And not just free marketing, but the kind of purely-voluntary testimonials that are impossible, literally impossible, to recreate by artificial means. We're talking about instant trust. But what about traffic? How does the fact that my online content passes the APE test draw people to my website in the first place? I don't care what you say: what about Google? Well, by putting Google from your mind and thinking purely in terms of a good customer experience, you will satisfy all of Google's requirements. Your website will be crammed with original, relevant content, the kind of content that will naturally swarm with keywords and semantically-related phrases. You don't really need to try. It just happens, naturally, organically. Imagine yours is a skin care website, selling skin care products. If you cram your website full of useful, original articles about the importance of a good cleansing regime, the importance of diet, the need for a well ventilated bedroom and a strict rehydration regime, you can't help but create the kind of website Google loves: fresh, original, relevant. Combine this with your positive customer experience and your online enterprise becomes a force to be reckoned with. Forget Google. Think Customer. Think content. Go APE! college paper writing service reviews
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