Content development (web)

Web content development is the process of researching, writing, gathering, organizing, and editing information for publication on web sites. Web site content may consist of prose, graphics, pictures, recordings, movies or other media assets that could be distributed by a hypertext transfer protocol server, and viewed by a web browser.

Content developers and web developers

When the World Wide Web began, web developers either generated content themselves, or took existing documents and coded them into hypertext markup language (HTML). In time, the field of web site development came to encompass many technologies, so it became difficult for web site developers to maintain so many different skills. Content developers are specialized web site developers who have mastered content generation skills. They can integrate content into new or existing web sites, but they may not have skills such as script language programming, database programming, graphic design and copywriting.
Content developers may also be search engine optimization specialists, or Internet marketing professionals. This is because content is called 'king'. High quality, unique content is what search engines are looking for and content development specialists therefore have a very important role to play in the search engine optimization process. One issue currently plaguing the world of web content development is keyword-stuffed content which are prepared solely for the purpose of manipulating a search engine. This is giving a bad name to genuine web content writing professionals. The effect is writing content designed to appeal to machines (algorithms) rather than people or community. Search engine optimization specialists commonly submit content to Article Directories to build their website's authority on any given topic. Most Article Directories allow visitors to republish submitted content with the agreement that all links are maintained. This has become a method of Search Engine Optimization for many websites today. If written according to SEO copywriting rules, the submitted content will bring benefits to the publisher (free SEO-friendly content for a webpage) as well as to the author (a hyperlink pointing to his/her website, placed on an SEO-friendly webpage).