Content is a curious beast in search engine marketing. Since I set up Little Big Voice, people have consistently asked me for my advice on content and how to approach a strong content strategy to boost the search engine ranking positions of their websites. Content does require a strategy behind it or you will invariably saturate your site with content that isn’t relevant or intelligent.

In the early days of Google – even up until recently – the quality of the content didn’t matter to them. These days, the plates have shifted and Google now wants quality content over excesses of content. With a proper strategy behind it and an intelligent implementation of a plan, you can drive good traffic to your website with strong search referrals. Without that, your site is going to have a real struggle on its hands.

Even today, websites are churning out content for the sake of having it on their site. They write, they upload and they wait for the traffic to come streaming in without a single thought to writing quality articles relevant to their desired keywords. It’s no longer enough to saturate the site with content; the content has to serve a purpose and speak to both an audience of readers and the Google bots. A hundred pages of mediocrity pales against a handful of quality content pages that were written for a purpose.

Unique 

The Google search engine algorithm actively ‘punishes’ sites that have plagiarised or duplicate content. It does this by dropping the duplicated pages down in the search rankings far below the original content. Duplicated content creates a hostile environment for your site because it creates a negative picture for the search bots. As a result, you will find that all of your search engine marketing efforts will be undone very quickly. Search engines will see you as a spam site or worse. Developing unique content will lead to increased search referrals and drive traffic to your site if you sustain the content strategy intelligently.

Search engine marketing is a case of building up trust on two fronts. You have to build ‘trust’ with the search engines by providing strong content that adheres to the laws of GoogleBot, but you also have to prove your worth to your audience. Quality content will bring an audience back to your site for more information on relevant or associated subjects.

The online community is very sharp. If you’ve plagiarised content, particularly if you’ve done so from another competitor’s site, you will get found out. The online community has a sharp eye for things like this and they can spot it instantly if they’ve been reading about the specified topics in more than one place. Write targeted content that’s focused on matters of interest relevant to your site and keywords. Establish yourself as an authority on your keywords and subject matter and your audience will trust you for information above others.

Paul

This is another popular question for search engine marketers and Google-snipers to ask, but it should be met with a fairly resolute, “no.” Google updates its search engine algorithm almost daily in order to keep up with the fluid world of search engine marketing.

Black hats start to lose their shirts

As Google adapts its algorithm and implements changes to it, it’s getting harder for black hats to use their shady techniques to boost themselves up the rankings. The latest updates favour newer content to give fresher results. Doing this shows that good quality, organic content. The black hats who swear by out of date algorithms are going to see their traffic disappear like a Las Vegas magician.

Like the Panda update, these changes to the algorithm are actually quite significant. Panda sent a lot of businesses into a fright because it changed the game in a big way. Panda would downgrade the beastly content farm websites that have copied content or saturated their pages with useless, black-hat content. Some legitimate sites have also suffered losses in their ranking positions since the algorithm change

What the new algorithm looks for in websites:

• Fresher results that will affect 35 per cent of results: that’s huge compared to other updates to the algorithm. The new content added to sites will be higher in the rankings. This isn’t new necessarily, but it has been radically improved from the 17.5 per cent freshness of previous updates. Does this mean that they are improved by 35 per cent; that’s an important distinction to make in order to look at the  algorithm update objectively. It simply means that 35% of results are going to be affected by the most recent algorithm update.
• Official pages will now rank highly in the search engine rankings: all official brand or company pages, official blogs and sites will all be boosted in the Google rankings. This increases the effectiveness of all ‘official’ pages and should – in theory – cut down on some of the more underhanded search engine marketing techniques employed by various competitors within certain industries. This modification should render fake or dodgy pages irrelevant or certainly impact on their effectiveness in the search engine rankings.

People always feel like they are having the proverbial rug pulled from under them whenever Google does something to change the way it ranks pages. The reality is that search is like that; it’s a fluid process and it is always evolving in order to compensate for changes in the industry or changes in technologies. It’s an organic medium and one that should always be evolving in order to give a balanced approach to marketing via search engines and the rankings. As Google grows to decide what’s ‘important’ and what is deemed to be unimportant.

Paul