SEO Content Is Still King

Zachary Williamson | August 8, 2011 | 0 Comments

With the latest Panda 2.1 update, Google inches even closer to it’s ultimate goal of making sure the site with the highest quality content has a higher chance of getting ranked #1. As Google’s search engine algorithms evolve and become more sophisticated, so must your website’s content. In the old days Googlebot used to just read simple attributes like keyword density, word count. Now Google has formulated algorithms that make Googlebot an astute content critic. The foundation to any SEO campaign lies in the content that your site has to offer the user.

With the rise of off-page SEO people started acquiring thousands of links to their websites; On-page SEO became less important and Google’s search results suffered. Even though On-page SEO Attributes have evolved to include many more fields of information that you can stuff bot food into like file names, h1s, h2s, h3s, permalinks, and alt tags, Google has put a much higher emphasis on the actual user’s behavior. Instead of expecting a bot to read an article and determine the quality and relevancy, Google has realized that an actual human will always be able to do this better. That being said, search engines are now using behavioral attributes like CTR (click through ratios), bounce rates and time spent on the page to help rank websites accordingly.

SEO Content as Your Site’s Foundation

This means that content has maintained it’s throne as the king. Your site must have actual sticking power. You can spend tons of hours and SEO dollars adding thousands of links, social media likes and +1s and this might get you to the top of the search engines but with a low CTR and a high bounce rate your rankings will bounce right out of the search results as well. Therefore, building links to crappy sites and crappy content is like trowing money down the drain.

Depending on the type of site you have you can increase the quality of your content by adding informative, unique and high quality textual content. But fancy research and writing alone won’t get you to the top of the SERPs. I recommend using what Matt Cutts calls linkbait. A few good ideas for linkbait could be interactive rich media like polls, APIs, applications, online tools or anything that could get a community to interact with each other online. In conclusion, you should spend an equal amount of time and effort producing good content as you would on SEO.

Siloing to Improve Quality and On-page Optimization

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Google also likes to see a well organized site as a representation of high quality. Bruce Clay became the godfather of siloing when he recently coined the term “Theming Throguh Siloing” . What siloing means is that if you have a site that is about fruit, categorize the content in an organized manor keeping each category or silo, clean and relevant. In simplest terms don’t write about oranges in the apples section. This practice can even be endorsed by making sure that no content gets placed into two categories at the same time. Furthermore, the internal link structure should not loosely interlink between the silos. And lastly, even though the <nofollow> tag is now officially ignored by Google on all external or outbound links, it still comes in very handy for internal the cases where the silos are broken or cross.

To sum it all up, good SEO starts with good content. Now get out there and kick some Google ass!