Google indexes lots of different things – words, images, videos. It manages to do this very well with words and sort-of OK with images and videos.

The trouble with images and videos is that it hasn’t got the computational power to deal with that. The last figure I read said that YouTube gets 72 hours of video uploaded every minute. That’s 4,320 days worth of video uploaded every single day. That takes a lot of processing.

YouTube makes an attempt to understand any voices on the video. You’ll see a “CC” option for any videos where it’s done this and if the author of the video hasn’t gone in and changed it, you’ll also be able to check how good this machine transcription is. Last time I checked, the answer was “not very good”.

Images are also difficult for Google to interpret.

What’s your interpretation of the image on the right?

I chose a stock image that came up for a search for modern art but the image creator thinks this stands for winter. It could also be some kind of alien device or a space construction. Or lots of other interpretations.

Words are less open to interpretation.

Not totally unambiguous – the English language can be quite ambiguous at times, the same almost certainly goes for other languages.

But Google also knows context.

So I’m going to confuse it now!

Apple is one of my favourite examples of this. It could refer to all sorts of things (in no particular order):

• Apple Records
• An Apple computer
• An Apple phone or tablet
• The Apple iTunes store
• The saying that an apple a day keeps the doctor away
• An apple in a bowl of fruit
• An apple in a recipe
• Apple juice
• Sparkling apple juice in a drink like Appletiser
• Apple cider
• Apple brandy
• A gift from teacher’s pet
• The apple of your eye
• And probably lots more

Google actually does a good job of working out words in context.

It’s got literally trillions of pages that it has indexed. So it knows the kind of words that are on the same page depending on context.

And most of the time it gets this right.

So the main emphasis of your website should be words.

You can support those words with images and videos. But written words are definitely the way to go for the forseeable future.

Google just does a better job of indexing words than anything else.

If you’re still not convinced, check out how many times songs with lyrics in the description come up high in a YouTube search.

So, we’re back to words…

My personal preference is to type.

I’m a two finger typist (plus my thumb for the space bar) but I can type reasonably fast. Last I checked, about 40 words per minute. I use the spell checker in my word processor and let it highlight things if I’ve got them wrong.

Or if I’m not sure how a word is spelled, I just type it into Google and let the “did you mean?” option correct me if necessary.

Your typing speed will dictate whether you’re going to actually type out your website content or whether you take a typing course to bring your speed up (plenty available online, often for free) or whether you decide to speak your website content instead.

Nowadays, a lot of people prefer to speak their website content.

You don’t need a fancy microphone like the one in the image.

If I’m going down this route, I put on my Skype headset and get accused of looking like a call centre operator.

I’ve got a Windows PC, so apologies to any Mac users as I don’t know the products available for them.

Since Vista, Windows has had a fairly unpublicised speech to text option. It needs installing but that doesn’t take long. Once you’ve done that, you’ll get the option to record your speech when you next open you word processor.

It works but isn’t great.

If you’ve got the budget, the best program out there is Dragon Naturally Speaking. It needs training to recognise your voice – it does this as standard.

Once you’ve trained it, it will act as your personal secretary and will automatically transcribe your speech.

Most of the time, it will get it right.

Which makes creating your website content an order of magnitude faster than typing.

At first, you’ll probably find that transcription programs are actually slower than typing. This is because it’s not the “normal” way that you write.

But once you get used to using a transcription program, you’ll find that you get quicker and quicker. Once you’re up to speed, 500 words of website content will likely take you about 5 minutes.

Which is a lot better than typing, where you’d need to be typing at roughly double the speed of a professional typist to be able to reach that.

If you don’t want to buy a program then another alternative is to record your words as before but then use a transcription service. This is actually a good way to dip your toe in the water on using audio to create your website content.

The service I’ve used to transcribe my recordings is Fiverr. You can drill down to find someone who can do the job and check the ratings for their previous jobs.

The better people on that site will ask you to upload your audio first so that they can give you a precise quote for doing the work – take that option if it’s offered.

A few days later, you’ll get your words back, typed out for you.

Take a bit of time to check that they’ve got the transcripion right and then use it as content for your website.

I’d suggest that you add new content on a regular basis.

Decide on a schedule that’s good for you. There’s no point in aiming for a new page on your website every day if you only get round to creating content once a week.

Go with something that’s workable – it’s much better to do that than give up because you’re facing overwhelm.

Aim to have at least half the content you create hosted on your website.

The remainder of your content should be used to create links pointing back to your site – article directories, guest blogging and much more.

If you need help creating content, check out this offer.