Content beyond blah-blah

A few years ago, I heard the phrase "content is king." It was right about the time when people were starting to understand that nothing woos a searchbot like some keyword rich content.

I was so excited. Finally, writers would ascend to their righteous spot at the head of the universe. We would be hailed for our prolific prose, our way with words, our awe-inspiring alliteration.

Yeah, right.

This is the land of the free and the home of the Fox network, and unless your article is as interesting as a NASCAR vehicle flying over the guard-rail into crowd, no one is going to read it.

Okay, maybe I exaggerate a tad, but the point I'm getting at it is that content for content's sake just seems intuitively wrong to me. It's like stocking a bookstore with titles that no ones going to read. The online equivalent of Springsteen's "57 channels and nothins' on".

If you're going to write on the web, there has to more to your work than just a bunch of keywords. You've got to be good, got to be readable, and you've got to be the stuff that people are going to what to set a link to, otherwise Google and all the rest of the Yahoos won't give you the time of day.

And yes, this article is a perfect, riveting example of just that kind of prose.