Slowly, SEO has become an unsavory word that is not very well accepted in the industry, which is not how it should have been. Search engine optimization did take a darker turn during early and mid-2000s but it has slowly evolved to replace black hat techniques with hard work, great content, social media optimization and feedback from the target audience.
All these techniques have made it possible for genuine and hardworking companies to appear in search results organically without breaking Google’s or other search engine companies’ rules. Moreover, SEO as people knew it could not have sustained itself anyway, because search engine algorithms keep changing.
With this in mind, there has been a lot of focus on content writing and publishing. It is a well-known fact now that the more we publish blog, the more we might have a chance of appealing to our target audiences. Yet, there is a growing tendency to believe that what we are doing now may not be enough. It may be necessary to revisit the concept of deep content, which too fell out of favor in favor of ‘just writing’.
How does deep content help you and what should be the process to follow?
Deep content helps you to enable business information to be stored and managed in such a way that it is not only read by humans but also by computers. This means, writing needs to take a look at two things: human readers and computer bots. This does not mean stuffing content with keywords or phrases. Instead, it means that it may be necessary to change our thinking paradigms about publishing content online.
Today, we are still using human language to store and express information online. This makes your content limited as computers cannot process language the way humans can. Probably, we will need to look at other options such as being readable by software programs and computers as well. This will require us to think about meta data first and then write content based on that.
All this while, content writing has been done first, after which meta data is weaved into it. More and more companies are looking towards a meta-data first policy so that computers are taken into account as well. To move to a data-first world, we need to think from the point of view of software programs and computers.
Deep content looks impressive but it may not be a practical solution
While this looks simple, it may still be quite unworkable in most circumstances. First of all, though deep content sounds impressive, it does not sound natural. For example, a content writer might struggle hard to make content look natural, if meta data is first taken into consideration. This will result in a strained and labored effort which might turn off your human readers.
The solution then is to actually hire data specialists who can work with content once it is written. Though data-first policy may see appealing, in most circumstances, it may appear artificial. A better technique is to get content written and then hire data specialists to focus on making the content readable by computers.
This might involve creating another file specifically for computers or software programs, which is not such a bad idea after all. So, at the end of the day, though deep content seems like a good idea, it is not practical in most cases. We might have to follow what we have done all this while and focus on improving technical aspects once content is written.
