Honesty is the best policy. We have been hearing and reading this proverb since very long. It is also known to humans by experience of ages and ages that honesty always triumphs in the end. No matter what you are doing if you are honest with your cause, it is good for you as well as the stakeholders of your system. You may be doing any business, may it be mending shoes on the footpath or running a multinational firm, if you are honest you will succeed. This is the lesson we have learnt from the lives of a long line of highly successful people. This principle also applies to the field of internet.
People, now-a-days, consider the internet to be an authentic source of information. They use it to obtain information for everything from a friendly debate to writing a graduating thesis. The internet is increasingly becoming one hub for all the knowledge generated by the human race since the beginning of time. Daily, thousands of terabytes of new data is added to this enormous data reservoir.
There is only one thing wrong with the internet. There is no one monitoring whether something being uploaded is true or not or what is the credibility of a certain piece of information available online. This is something we have to remedy. Yes we! The internet developers and website owners! It is the moral obligation of anyone uploading even a single letter on to the internet to make sure what they are saying is true and authentic and exactly related to the point under which heading it is being added.
Being honest to the customer can be beneficial to the website owners in a number of ways.
- The customer is satisfied when they get to-the-point information.
- They return if the information is correct
- They remember your website and come back again and suggest it to their friends if the content is written in a simple tone.
Being honest to the reader does not only get you a permanent reader or a group of readers, the readers are also a source of advertisement for your website. In addition to this, the readers also give a good feedback of your site on a number of forums which means higher ranking in the natural search results of search engines. This will eventually get you more traffic.
Let’s have an eye on the other side. What if you are not honest with your reader? One thing is sure; they will not come back and will also tell people around them to avoid your site. This will cause a decrease in your traffic as well as rating causing you monetary losses. But there is also another face of this thing. The reader also suffers losses due to your dishonesty. A student may fail due to the wrong information provided on your site; a child may develop a basic concept wrong which will be stuck in his mind forever.
It is not just a hypothetical idea we have narrated, but many studies and theories have proved importance of relevancy of the content. Ascend2 conducted an online survey among more than 50,000 sales, marketing and business professionals from leading marketing companies all over the world. Results of the survey reflect, 72% of the marketers declared relevant content creation as the leading factor in customers and search engines satisfaction.
