Content Is King When It Comes To SEO

Gone are the days when you used to be able to jam a bunch of keywords into your copy, publish subpar content and see your site rank in search engines. Long, long gone in fact. If anything, things have taken such a dramatic shift in search marketing that some are starting to think that SEO is dead.

How so?

Well, with the tweaks to Google’s algorithm over the past couple of years, most recently with the last update in May 2013, many of the old tactics for SEO either became ineffective or could actually harm your search rankings. SEO isn’t dead. It’s just evolved.

In today’s world of search engine marketing, you have to learn to play by the new rules. A large part of search success today revolves around content, content, and more content, especially in highly competitive markets, such as the web hosting industry. Let’s look a little more closely at the role that content plays…

High quality

What would constitute poor quality? Duplicated copy, content that actually doesn’t read well and was written for a search engine rather than a human being or spammy, unscrupulous tactics like cloaking would all fall under the category of poor quality content. If a tactic even remotely whiffs of black hat, stay far, far away.

On the flip side, high quality content is 100% original, whether it’s blog posts or product descriptions. It’s informative and factual, including comprehensive data. It’s about what your customers or visitors would actually want to read. Information that they are looking for and that would be useful for them, especially when it comes to making that all important purchasing decision. Demonstrate your expertise, show that you are a thought leader in your industry and that you are here to help with every piece of content you put out.

Using keywords

Keyword stuffing, or inserting as many keywords as possible into a piece of content, does not work. Over optimization can get you in trouble.

Some of you may anxiously be thinking, how many keywords am I allowed to use? What is the exact ratio allowed? How many keywords should I target per page? Should I make my pages really long so that I can include more keywords?

Rather than giving you a specific formula, use this as a guideline: what would my site visitor think?

• Is the number of times I’m using a keyword coming across as strange?
• Is the way that I’m incorporating the keyword into content natural, or is it awkward and very obvious that I’m trying to fit in a keyword string?
• Does the content read poorly?
• Is the content I’m publishing actually useful? Or it self-serving just for SEO?

Plenty of content

In search marketing, both quality and quantity matter. Quality first and foremost – I’m certainly not encouraging you to sacrifice quality for quantity! However, it’s also crucial that you leverage your website as much as possible with the “being useful” consideration top of mind, always.

• Create all the website pages that a site visitor would be looking for. Many businesses only focus on their product pages, but other content such as About pages, FAQs, and a Knowledgebase for example, should also be part of your overarching search strategy.
• A blog is a must. Keeping it regularly updated and producing interesting content is the name of the game.
• Think about other content that you can produce in the name of providing value. Whitepapers, e-books, or downloads for example, that your target market would be genuinely interested in reading.
• You don’t just have to stick to text or words. Infographics, videos and webinars are all popular forms of content, with people, as well as search engines.
• Great content also leads to sharing via social media. Social signals help drive your search ranks even further.

A large part of successful SEO has become synonymous with content creation. Get writing and producing to supercharge your search engine marketing efforts.