Following from Mike's post from last week, you may be wondering, “What is quality content when it comes to building a website?”
What is content?
Content is the written word and media on your site, and in a broader sense it’s what your website is all about. If your site is about fish oil, your content might include which fish oil supplement works the best, what part of the fish it comes from, etc, --- and you’ll use text, images, and other media to communicate that.
What makes quality content?
It's often as simple as asking, “Is my content already covered on a lot of websites?” Continuing with the fish oil example, that “niche” (narrow topic), is already full of other sites with high hits on Google, so you have a lot of competition. Having content that simply explains which fish oil works best and where fish oil comes from wouldn't be unique enough. You probably wouldn't get a lot of traffic because visitors have so many other sites to choose from so the odds are against you.
How to stand out in a crowded niche.
You have to find an edge for your site if you are interested in making a site about a popular topic, or niche. Let's look at the fish oil site again. If you want to stick with this topic and be successful with it, you would have to find a unique way to make your site stand out against the million other fish oil sites.
For example, a lot of other fish oil sites use scientific studies on humans to prove whether or not fish oil supplementation is beneficial or not. However, few sites compare how many studies show that supplementation does help, versus the number of studies that don't. You could compile proven and interesting data in a way that is not done so anywhere across the web, which helps your site visitors see value in your content because it expands their knowledge about fish oil, where other sites only gave bits of information.
You could also keep your site content fresh by covering the latest advancements in fish oil, such as inventions of new capsules for fish oil that make it last longer on the shelves or the latest ways of extracting fish oil for better potency. Your goal should be to put this new information on the web before anyone else does, and build a reputation for doing that. This would definitely be considered quality content because people always want to learn about the latest advancements, rather than rely on outdated information.
But what if your passion is unique enough already?
It is also perfectly ok to have a website topic that doesn't have a lot of other sites in it, and this is probably the easier way to build good content. If you have a passion for, say, organic furniture, you would be in luck because most likely any decent content about that topic would be quality. That is because there are just no other sites about that topic.
Make it unique, keep it new, write about interesting things, and your site should be on its way to success.