What would be impossible for me to do is to provide your content! Your content is everything you know and want to present to the public about your business, service, project, endeavor, etc. That is what you provide! For example, take a look at zaporacle.com, one of the sites I developed and run as web master. My client is Jonathan Zap. This site is filled with thousands of pages of writings, hundreds of images, dozens of podcasts—in other words, this man’s life work. This is the content. All of this material is created by Jonathan Zap, the content provider. Everything technical about this site, the infrastructure, the lines of code, the graphics of the start page and the home page, that is what I provide. Jonathan has never written one line of code, and likewise I have never written one line of his writings or supplied any of his content.

To be sure this is absolutely clear, allow me to use the following analogy. You hire a contractor to build you a house. They create all the infrastructure—plumbing, electric. They make sure that your house is structurally sound and up-to-code. They can make the outside of the house look great and supply you with vaulted ceilings and skylights and so forth if you want them to. That is what they do. Then, when their work is done, you supply the content of the house—your family, furnishings, groceries and so forth. Now think of google’s web bots as like very, very smart visitors to your home who are going to evaluate how safe and desirable a place it is to visit. First they stop in front of your house and survey it’s infrastructure. They can tell if it has up-to-code plumbing and electric, etc. If it does, that adds to your rank. If you hired a good contractor, like me, who has done things right, you get the maximum boost in your ranking based on those factors. But then the google web bots enter your home and look into every nook and cranny to see if it looks like an hospitable and interesting place on the inside that visitors will want to come to. They examine all your content and analyze it every which way they can—how much of it there is, how unique it is, how many links it has, how many other sites link to it, etc. Getting back to the house analogy—if you have unique paintings on your walls, rare books in your library and so forth, your ranking goes up. On the other hand, if these web bots come into your house and find that even though it’s got great infrastructure you have almost nothing inside but a few empty packing crates, then your rank goes down. You wouldn’t go to your building contractor and say, “Where’s my furniture and wall decorations? How come I don’t have books in the study? How come no one wants to visit my empty house?” The content of your house is what you provide. Some people, who can afford it, may hire interior decorators to help them pick out furnishings. They might even hire a social secretary to help them write up elegant invitations to events being held at the house and so forth. These products and services, however, are not the job of the contractor who builds the house!

You know more about the content you want in your house than anyone else. In some cases, however, you might want to hire a professional to help you express or organize that content. For example, I am an expert developer of Word Press websites. I am not, however, an expert in organizing and expressing my ideas in writing. For example, I did not write this section, I hired the services of Jonathan Zap, the very client I described in the example above. I told him the content I wanted in broad outline, and he organized it and turned it into words for me. He is a professional writer and editor with a graduate degree in writing from NYU. So I hire him to help with my writing. He hires me to develop and run his website. These are completely different skill sets and services. If you need help developing the content of your website and expressing yourself in writing I can put you in touch with him, or you can find your own writer/editor to provide this service.

Because I value you as a client I want to be as clear as possible about the service that I provide, what that includes and what is beyond that service. No amount of google optimization can help you past a certain point if the content of your site is deficient. Google’s web bots are highly intelligent and observant little artificial life forms ever adapting and learning how not to be tricked. I can build you a well-designed state-of-the-art home, but if there is nothing in that home they are going to know that and your ranking will reflect that.