Oftentimes as you browse the web looking for tips or tricks to improve your websites, lenses, blogs, and other digital online ’stuff’ you run into perhaps two of the most cliche sayings on the internet in the web development space: ‘content is king’ and you need to have ‘unique content’.

Since neither of these phrases really provide any practical use to users, let’s try to move beyond it a bit and actually define what we mean when we talk about ‘content’.

How I define ‘web content’

Web content is a collection of data presented in a browser that has been modified in a unique way by the creator of that data.

Using a squidoo lens as an example, I usually term the following as ‘content’:

  • Module order
  • Module title
  • Module subtitles
  • text input by the lens creator
  • text readable by visiting web crawlers and spiders that was filtered by the lensmaster
  • pictures
  • picture alt text
  • keywords
  • Page (lens) title
  • external links
  • internal links
  • HTML formatting

Note: I don’t consider my profile to be a part of my definition of ‘unique’ or ‘kingly’ content because I run the same profile on every lens. If you modified your profile differently for each lens I may be convinced to include it in this list although it would probably just fall under ‘text input by lens creator’.

Now that we have defined content in a general way, you can begin to look at your lenses in the context of ‘unique’.

Do you have default module titles or ordering?

If you are aggregating content is it filtered or presented in a unique or at least interesting way?

The name of the game for both you and Google is to add value. Regurgitating something you already had elsewhere doesn’t add any ‘value’ to anything.

Conversely, providing an excerpt and or link to other valuable resources by framing them within the context of your lens can definitely provide value.

You don’t solve any problems or create any new questions by simply copying something else. You need disparity, corollary, contrasting, comparison or some other kind of value you provide that makes it unique to you and to google.

Digg doesn’t write articles. It aggregates them in a unique and interesting way. Are they still creating something unique and useful? You bet.

While content certainly can be defined as just the words on the page and unique can be defined as ‘not exactly the same because i moved some words around’ there is a deeper meaning to content that if you try and explore I think you will be surprised at how easy it is to add value to a visitor’s experience when they visit your lens.

Got that?

Okay, now that you’ve created something that actually has value to it, is it useful for me to recommend to a friend as a resource? You can do quite well by creating lenses with a minimum standard of value that incrementally helps your visitor along their path. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it and probably all but a couple hundred lenses fall into this category.

However, there is also something to be said for a lens that provides such enormous value that your visitors have to bookmark it because they will never find anything about that topic as useful again. A lens with enormous value does not have to be enormous in size or scope, but in utility. Figuring out how to make these types of lenses quickly and effectively will probably be the biggest development in lensbuilding in 2009.