Content is a vital component of any website or any marketing/advertising tool, for that matter. However, this was realized only lately that it is important to have good content on the website. Earlier, having a website meant designing visually creative pages. Importance of content was always ignored and it was just thought of as placing some text in between various pieces of graphics. However, with the advent of search engines, importance of content gained prominence. The advantages of having good content finally started receiving its long due significance. With the importance of content growing for websites, the need for web site content management systems has also increased.

There are various factors that bring the importance of web site content management under prime consideration.

• Putting relevant quality content on the website will clearly define the objective of the website and convey the business/company/product profile.
• A website with good content will have visitors spending more time on it and returning to the site often.
• Having properly structured niche content will increase the website’s credibility and may help in converting a visitor into a potential customer.
• Content with adequate number of keywords will make the website search engine optimized, thus improving its visibility on search engine results.
• Other websites will want to link to quality content rich website. This will increase the number of referral visitors to the website and also its exposure to search engines thereby increasing the overall popularity of the website.

Having understood the importance of content, it is also essential to know the web site content management process. There are various ways of getting good content. You can write the required content yourself and get it tweaked from a professional editor or you can directly hire a professional content writer. However, before doing the above steps of directly writing the content or getting it written, the objectives for having a proper content should be clearly defined. This could include making decisions about:

• Target audience with relevant demographics, if applicable.
• Length of the content and its structure.
• Specific words that need to be used and number of times they should occur in the entire content.
• Distribution of the content over the website.
• Frequency of updating the content.
• Use of appropriate web site content management system [http://www.karmatechnologies.co.uk/cms.htm].

A website with tidy, crisp, and persuasive content will definitely have lot of visitors hitting the site regularly. No matter how multimedia rich and flashy your website is, rich content is now a mandatory requirement for the survival of your website.

Jeff Smith is the managing director of Karma Technologies and feels strongly about implementing ways to be green into their business practices, to a point they are almost a paper-free company.